Minimum Wage The Questionable Policy
As early as 4:00 am in the dark and cold morning of winter, a few people walking on an wet sidewalk. Under chilling wind, those people walk to a large, old building. Inside the building, the people work for repetitive, backbreaking low waged jobs. In the same day, late at night, you can see similar scene: some people walking out of the building under heavy humidity.
I'm not one of those people, I don't know the feeling of a minimum waged worker. Like all of those workers, I feel exhausted after finishing my job. Everyday, I wait with impatience to hear my supervisor say “That's it, go home.” After I drop my load and park my truck and wipe my sweat, I can only think to return to My home and sleep. I lost most of my time and energy just for a few dollars.
There are a lot of people that work harder and earn less than me. The poor, especially less-skilled workers, have access only to “bad jobs at bad wages”. Those workers always face bad situations. They are poor. They are struggling to sustain the life of their resoective families.
On the contrary, the owners of the companies where we work have a high standard of living. Low wages are advantageous for the group of people known as traditional elites who own labor-intensive firms because it lowers production cost, thus increase the competitiveness of the product. For that reason, it is natural for the traditional elites to keep wage as low as possible.
This action creates what Karl Marx wrote in The Communist Manifesto as ”naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation”.
The minimum wage seems to be an appealing solution against these abusive exploitations. Applying a minimum wage law, government can force a wealth distribution among the owners and their lowest level workers. On Saturday, June 25, 1938, The U.S. Congress first instituted a minimum wage with the Fair Labor Standard Act. The minimum wage was set at 25 cents per