This measure is often monitored and used by government or other organisations as a benchmark for the wage level of individual workers in an industry, area or country.
[1] Certain UK organisations, usually socialist or left-of-centre political groups, have traditionally had a policy that members should never accept wages higher than the wage of the average working class person whilst being employed by that organisation or in a representative capacity.
Deputies and officials paid an average worker's wage are also a feature of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat described in Marx's account of the Paris Commune, The Civil War in France, as well as in Lenin's The State and Revolution commentary on Marx's pamphlet, although not all people who draw an average workers wage subscribe to Marxist principles.
Examples of people taking only an average worker's wage are Socialist Party politician Joe Higgins, former MP Dave Nellist in the UK, John Marek, Forward Wales' Welsh Assembly member for Wrexham, and Sinn Féin politicians in Ireland.
In The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell notes that the Labour Representation Committee MPs of the day took only an average workers' wage.