Recently, a fairly large number of people where unemployed for 6 months to 2 years which where receiving unemployment checks significantly above minimum wage. There was no point in them being ditch diggers as they would have earned a negative wage by doing so. Arguably, if most of these people had spent 20 hours a week doing manual labor they would have been far heather and even more motivated.

Now, there where plenty of reasons to set things up like this, but it also distorts what people thought was reasonable 100 years ago.