AC1408307
EN130.2.2 English Composition II
Assignment 7: Argumentative Essay
March 31st 2015
Minimum Wage
The minimum wage must be raised because the cost of living has gone up considerably. Education is essential if one wishes to work, and the cost of education has increased drastically in the past twenty years. Companies should be required to pay workers what they deserve, and that is more than minimum wage is now. With our new technology and the technology in the future work is harder and more complicated. A minimum wage increase would raise the wages of many workers and increase benefits to those disadvantaged workers. Because the cost of living has sky rocketed, it has become almost impossible to raise a family on a minimum wage job. A person living on his or her own cannot survive on minimum wage job either. Their living expense would just be too much. The earnings of minimum wage workers are crucial to their families well being. Evidence from 2013 and 2014 minimum wage increase shows that an average minimum wage worker brings home more than half of his or her family's weekly earnings. In 2013 one million single mothers with children under 18 would have benefited from a minimum wage increase to $10.15. Single mothers are 10% of workers affected by an increase but they make up only 5.7 of the overall work force. More than two million married men and women with children under age 18 would also benefit from an increase. Adults make up the largest share of workers who would benefit from a minimum wage increase. Adults age 20 and over will make up approximately sixty-eight percent of the workforce affected by a minimum wage increase to $10.15 by 2015. Close to half of the workers who would benefit from a minimum wage increase work full time and another third work between twenty and thirty four hours a week. The minimum wage needs to be increased for families to survive in our society today.