For this assignment I chose Economics as the field that I wanted to learn about because it has a great impact on my life. It also is something that I want to learn more about. The article that I read is called: The economics of minimum wage legislation. I really enjoyed this article because it talked about how we are always looking at what we should do to help the job market and the suppliers as well. This article talks about two things that can happen when there is a minimum wage that is enforced. The first is that there are people that work in a job that may be under qualified and if the employer is forced to pay him above what he is worth then he would lose his job. The other outcome is that if the minimum wage is razed then the employee…
Ai - Imagine you are a newly appointed supervisor/manager within your service. You need to update your staff handbook to reflect current employment law.…
Raising the minimum wage affects all workers young and old. You might might think that receiving more money is a good thing but it actually negatively affects the economy and its jobs. Raising the minimum wage will eliminate jobs because the employer has to pay the workers more so they will hire less and might replace them with computers or robots. Oxford University researchers Carl Benedikt Frey, PhD, and Michael A. Osborne, DPhil, stated in a 2013 study that "robots are already performing many simple service tasks such as vacuuming, mopping, lawn mowing, and gutter cleaning" and that "commercial service robots are now able to perform more complex tasks in food preparation, health care, commercial cleaning, and elderly care." Raising the…
When you increase minimum wage, it limits entry-level jobs because it causes businesses to hire fewer workers therefore just leaving even more people without a job. In one study it says that for every 10 percent increase in the minimum wage, it would affect the unemployment rates by roughly 2 percent (Raising the Minimum Wage Will Not Help The Poor). So you can see how going from 7.25$ an hour to 15$ an hour can affect that number. Not only are many workers laid off, but the ones who keep their jobs are cut back a lot on their hours to where they were making less than before they raised minimum wage. So combined with the lower working hours and many workers getting laid off you would think people would understand why not to raise it. There is also one major reason why raising minimum wage doesn’t affect people in poverty, many of your minimum wage workers aren't even in poverty. Many minimum wage workers are between the age of 16 and 24, many of these people are high schoolers or college kids trying to earn some extra money. People make the argument that there are single parents trying to make enough to support their kids and they need better wages, but what you may not know is that very very few people working a full time minimum wage job are alone and a single parent. Less than 1 in 25 minimum wage workers are single parents who work a full-time…
Everyone has had a point in their life where they were not satisfied with their pay- whether it’s at a fast food restaurant or a higher business job. Many teenagers and young adults start working at a low-wage job to gain experience and earn a little money. However, because of the minimum wage, many people get an education or learn required skills to shoot for a higher paying job making it a good reason why the current minimum wage isn't so bad. It gives teenagers a chance to gain work ethics and experience and encourage others to work even harder.…
Today, the real value of the minimum wage has fallen by nearly one-third since its peak in 1968. And right now, a full-time minimum wage worker makes $14,500 a year, which leaves too many families struggling to make ends meet.There are many states that have already approved minimum wage increase through ballot measures in 2014 election. Raising the minimum wage would raise the incomes of 28 million Americans. Therefore women would particularly benefit because they tend to work for lower wages than men. “88% of adults with more than a third over age forty work for minimum wage.” (Van Buren, 2014) Many breadwinners are working for minimum wage and it isn’t enough to support the household therefore raising minimum wage would help many struggling Americans whether full time or part time. Raising the minimum wage is an important anti-poverty tool, but the current minimum wage leaves too many families in…
Minimum wage laws set the lowest remuneration an employer can pay an employee which protects employees from being taken advantage of and provides a fair amount for unskilled, entry level positions. Having a fair but low minimum wage should motivate people to better themselves, get educated and not live in poverty. Being paid more on either end of the scale is not a right just because one wants it. This is the self-centered type of thinking DesJardins refers to regarding people "trying to priviledge their own selfish wants by calling them rights (2011, p. 40)". Unlike minimum wage laws, maximum wage laws should not exist for at least a few reasons. A maximum wage penalizes those who work harder than the average person, and it would be impossible…
The extra money could help pay off bills or provide food for individuals and/or families. Families living off minimum wage have daily choices that are hard to choose, like spend money on food that week, or pay the electric bill. Locations like Los Angeles, New York state, and Washington, D.C. have already started on raising the minimum wage to fifth-teen dollars an hour(5 facts about the minimum wage). When the idea of raising the minimum wage comes up, many argue that it would only benefit teens, but in fact eighty-nine percent of the minimum wage workers are between the ages of twenty or older(Minimum Wage Myth…
Stereotypically: high school/college dropouts. Jobs that receive minimum wage are for people who are not skilled enough to get a better job. The people who work for minimum wage are typically those who do not try their best in school. If they had skill then they would have been hired for a well paying job rather than minimum wage. This quote mainly says that even people who graduate with a bachelors degree end up working in the minimum wage field, so what happens to people who haven't got a degree? Well they usually tend on working for minimum wage. "7.9 percent of workers earning at or below the minimum wage have at most a bachelors degree. That said, only a very small share of college graduates overall actually wind up in minimum wage jobs" (Rampell,…
This policy paper’s main objective is to attempt to answer the question, " to what extent does income inequality relates to federal minimum wage". Though it is obvious that income inequality exists in every State, ethnicity, and generation, what makes it an important topic to discuss is the growing infliction of unequal distribution of household or individual income across the various participants in an American economy. Therefore, even with an existing policy that was passed in 1938, to assist with the uneven wealth distribution, the Fair Labor Standard Act (FLSA) enactment of federal minimum wage did little to improve the living status of the blue-collar workers throughout America. Thus, it is imperative to recognize the linkage and to what extent, if there is any, why a majority of Americans today still struggle to be well off or to become independent from governmental aid with the federal minimum wage policy in place, to which should stop or slow down the growing gap of income inequality.…
As stated before solving the problem of poverty may seem like a lofty goal, but different but different states within the United States have been able to enact certain polices which have dramatically reduced their levels of poverty and improved the quality of living for its citizens. According to the Economic Institute Policy’s policy Analyst Liana Fox, the current system of not adjusting the federal minimum wage yearly, causes the value of the minimum wage to decrease as inflation causes the cost of living to increase. This lack of action causes either one of two scenarios, either the states pick up the tab and enact minimum wage indexing or states do noting and the countries lowest paid workers are left with no way to deal the yearly rise…
The 44th president of the United States of America said, “We should raise the minimum wage so that no one who works full time has to live in poverty.” For those who do not know what minimum wage is, it is the lowest wage sanctioned by law or by a special arrangement. In the United States, the minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. According to BLS Reports, in 2014 77.2 million people at the ages of 16 and older were paid at hourly rates. Out of those 77.2 million, 1.3 million received the minimum wage, while 1.7 of them had wages below the minimum. Through years of petitions and fighting for a raise in minimum wage, the people of the US were finally noticed by President Barack Obama. The president himself has taken the situation into his own hands,…
Workers who have receive an education feel that individuals who have little to no education should not be paid the same amount as they. A majority of the people making minimum wage are under the age of 25, so they have plenty of time to work on getting an education, so they can as well earn more than minimum wage (Garcia, 2015). The U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics stated that out of the 3.3 million people employed in 2013, only 4.3% were paid minimum wage (Garcia, 2015). This number shows that the majority of individuals working in the United States already earns, more than minimum wage. Raising the minimum wage would end up encouraging people not to attend high school or college since they would be getting paid almost the same amount of money as people who did receive an education (Garcia,…
During 2014’s annual State of the Union address, President Obama aggressively addressed the age-old debate of raising the minimum wage. The President has urged legislators to raise the federal minimum wage to $10.10 per hour to fight the ongoing battle of class inequality. Subsequently, Massachusetts legislators proposed a bill that would incrementally raise the state minimum wage to $10.50 over the next two years just weeks after the President’s address. The prospects of this proposed legislation have left workers and liberals alike in Massachusetts rejoicing while employers and conservatives (all five of them) have balked at the bill. The following paper looks to examine this proposed bill and accompanying arguments for and against raising…
Studies suggest that an extravagant amount of workers earn either the current minimum wage of $7.25 an hour or less. As a matter of fact, in 2012 about 3.6 million workers fell into this category, which makes up about 4.7% of all hourly paid workers (Minimum Wage Workers). Even though the percentage of workers who fit into this category may seem slow, in reality it is an alarming rate especially since minorities and young people make up most of the population. As illustrated by the National Employment Law Project, 50% of minimum wage earners are 25 years of age and younger and another 5% of workers were of African American, Hispanic, Latino descent (NELP). That means that nearly 55% of workers who make the federal minimum wage are considered to be a minority across the nation. Another interesting statistic, reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is that about three-fifths of minimum wage workers are employed in some type of service related industry (Minimum Wage Workers). For instance, a lot of food servers, waiters and waitresses, only earn a minimum wage salary of $7.25 or less. However, in these professions, it is expected that employees receive tips from the served consumers. Then after combining the two entities, employees should earn a salary that is either equal to or more than the current minimum wage,…