In President Barack Obama's State of the Union Address, he said he would single-handedly increase the minimum wage from $7.25 per hour to $10.10 an hour, hoping that this action would help the "income gap" in America. There are many pros and cons to this proposal.
Antagonists against this proposal have estimated the employment would reduce by about 500,000 jobs. The promoters on the other hand are saying that this increase in minimum wage could help citizens rise above the poverty line and bump up weekly earnings for employees.
In my opinion, I think we should just leave the minimum wage where it is. Studies have shown that although some states have increased their minimum wage above the federal level between the years 2003 and 2007, poverty has not decreased at all. Which is the reason they decided to to that in the first place, right? Also, if you think about it, there would be a decrease in the less skilled and experienced. In other words, it would be more expensive for a restaurant owner to keep some employees so they would lose their job.
Think about it this way, we all started with minimum wage, and slowly but surely, over time we got raises and promotions from experience. If we don't have jobs to learn from, we can't make money, and if we don't make money... we're back right where we started.
2 comments:
Well, I would respectfully like to disagree. I would first like to address the comment, “there would be a decrease in the less skilled and experienced.” In Blue-Collar Brilliance, Mike Rose states, “Intelligence is closely associated with formal education- the type of schooling a person has, how much and how long- and most people seem to move comfortably from that notion to a belief that work requiring less schooling requires less intelligence. Basically, what Rose asserts in this essay is that, just because there are jobs that do not require a college degree doesn't mean that they require less intelligence.
For instance, waiting tables requires much intelligence. You have to definitely be a multi-tasker, always looking from table to table to see what everyone needs, thinking about how long their food is taking, if it is taking long, why? And you don't just address the physical needs of the customer. You have to deal with their psychological needs as well. It's a balancing act, and it's not always easy. So I don't think that it's reasonable to say that raising the minimum wage, especially when a waiter's wage is 2.13 hr, would make them less skilled. It has been said that restaurants would be the hardest hit from a minimum wage increase. When I researched the top 100 restaurants, their profits are in the millions and millions of dollars. Yet, I can tell you that at the end of the year, a restaurant worker's W2 shows that the restaurant itself has paid less than ten thousand dollars for that employee to work full time, all year long. There is no real evidence to suggest that raising the minimum wage will cause these restaurants to stop hiring people.
For example, San Francisco raised it's minimum wage in 2004. And according to a new book written by labor economists titled “When Mandates Work: Raising Labor Standards, employment increased by more than 5%, while others cities surrounding it had experienced decreases in employment. Employment for restaurant workers also increased by 17.7 %, more than anyone else in the Bay Area.
Now, look, I'm not saying someone who has chosen to have five kids should be able to live off a restaurant job. I understand that's not feasible or fair to ask the government to make sure of that. Raising the minimum wage to 10 dollars an hour sure won't make Americans that much better off than where they are now, but it's a start. But to assert that doing so would result in few skilled workers, I don't agree. Hell, waiters are already skilled in many ways college educated people aren't.
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