bare subsistence

Franklin Delano Roosevelt argued for wages that would provide workers with “more than a bare subsistence level. I mean the wages of a decent living.”

The mainly rural region is one of the poorest in the country, where rice farming provides only a bare subsistence living and well-paid jobs are scarce.

For example, Mr. Harari writes in “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind” that, after the advent of agriculture, rulers and elites sprang up “everywhere … living off the peasants’ surplus food and leaving them with only a bare subsistence.”

Everywhere, rulers and elites sprang up, living off the peasants’ surplus food and leaving them with only a bare subsistence.

He and his two married sons now share three tents between them, but he described life there as bare subsistence, with no heating and little health care.