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Positive and negative effects of minimum wage
How minimum wage affects people essay
Effects of rising minimum wage
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The Minimum Wage Should Be Increased In 2015, 78.2 million workers were paid at hourly rates. Which makes up 58.5 percent of all the wages and salary workers in the United States. Amongst those 870,000 workers earned exactly $7.25 per hour. The average household earns about $15,080 annually for a full- time minimum wage worker. ("Increasing the Minimum Wage: Pros & Cons") Minimum wage is the lowest wage that employers can legally pay their employees. The United States minimum wage was initially set at $0.25 per hour by The Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938. ("UC Davis Center for Poverty Research"). Due to a drastic increase to the cost of living since the early 1900s, it has then been increased to $7.25 an hour. The minimum wage should be …show more content…
Affording everyday essentials is crucial to human life. Lacking these essentials can cause many problems including homelessness. The current minimum wage is the root of these problems. With prices continuously on the rise, it is becoming more difficult to sustain life. People who earn the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour cannot find an affordable place to live anywhere in the United States, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, therefore the homeless population will continue to increase. The report found that to afford a one bedroom apartment at the average fair market rate without disbursing more than 30 percent of their income, someone must earn at least $16.25 an hour.”Stagnant wages have increasingly come into conflict with rising rent prices for most Americans. The share of renters paying more than half their income for housing has doubled since 1960.”This problem is due to surging rental demand mixed with a shortage of new units. “Between 2005 and 2014, there was an increase of 7.9 million renters, but only 2.2 million new units were added.” Furthermore, this will lead to an increase of price and demand which means that landlords can Consequently charge more for rent due to the limited amount of units that were added. ("Increasing the Minimum Wage: Pros &
Poverty continues to grow in America. The average minimum wage in the United States is $7.35 an hour- far too low in today’s society. Key expenses, for example, gas and housing prices, have gone up significantly since the minimum wage was last changed in 2007 (Wagner 52). The laws creating the minimum wage were intended to improve the standard of living and decrease poverty. Raising minimum wage is a vital step in decreasing poverty and giving every family the opportunity to survive and succeed. Millions of hard-working Americans are below the poverty line and need an increase in pay. Minimum wage must be raised because it will diminish poverty and assist the working class to support their families.
For the past year I have watched my younger sister struggle to support herself and her now 11 month old baby. She makes more than minimum wage. She has struggled to the point where she was evicted and now lives with me. I have also experienced struggling on low pay. When I was 18 I was kicked out of my family’s house, and I was only making $8 an hour. There were days where I had to choose between paying rent and getting my electricity shut off, just because I couldn’t work enough hours to pay all of my bills. It can be very scary to only make minimum wage and have to support yourself. There are changes that need to be made so that every person can live properly with any job.
Minimum wage is a topic that has been popping up since the 1980s. From whether we should lower it, or even raise it, but now in the 2000s minimum wage has been the center of attention more than ever. There are two sides to this topic of minimum wage; whether it creates more jobs or does not create jobs. Those who argue that raising minimum wage will create more jobs will have a rebuttal which is that it does not only cause the loss of jobs but that it would make things much worse and vice versa for those arguing raising minimum wage will cause loss of jobs. There will be two authors representing opposite views, Nicholas Johnson supporting minimum wage will not cost jobs with his article “ Evidence Shows Raising Minimum Wage Hasn’t Cost Jobs”
In each case, she is supporting only herself, not children or other dependents, and she begins the month with a minimum amount of savings and a car. In each case, however, aspects of her living situation work against her. For instance, when working at a Wal-Mart in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the city’s tight housing market forced her to live in a hotel with weekly rates. The number of Americans earning minimum wage has more than doubled since 2007, and many more earn just a little over minimum That number will likely increase in the years to come, as the Labor Department predicts that six of the ten occupations expected to be added through this decade will be low paying ones Experts may argue for numbers, but they can be too abstract to grasp.
I also think minimum wage effects what people can afford and therefore only allows them to look for low-income housing, which is limited. Like Reamer (1989) said, many families either divorce or don’t combine households which requires more units to live in. Many times women are in custody of the children, and she may work multiple minimum wage jobs trying to keep her kids in school or daycare while she affords rent and food. Her expenses would be higher because she is also paying for other mouths to feed—often on her own. That doesn’t leave much of her income to be allowed for rent. I also think that homelessness can happen to almost anyone. I have read stories of college educated adults whom are living on the streets. The majority of those who are homeless are in poverty, making the minimum wage in search of options that would allow them to afford the housing they need. I think that the cost of living is too high for a single parent or single person to be living on minimum wage. Everything costs too much, and it is unacceptable that people have to live on the streets because housing is a
Currently, in the United States, the federal minimum wage has been $7.25 for the past six years; however, in 1938 when it first became a law, it was only $0.25. In the United States the federal minimum wage has been raised 22 times since 1938 by a significant amount due to changes in the economy. Minimum wage was created to help America in poverty and consumer power purchasing, but studies have shown that minimum wage increases do not reduce poverty. By increasing the minimum wage, it “will lift some families out of poverty, while other low-skilled workers may lose their jobs, which reduces their income and drops their families into poverty” (Wilson 4). When increasing minimum wage low-skilled, workers living in poor families,
Congress created minimum wage with the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. The first minimum wage was only 25 centers per hour. Through history the minimum wage has increased a little at a time, umping a couple cents each time. The last time the United States changed the minimum wage was in 2007 which was a large jump from $5.15 per hour to $7.25 per hour. This jump of $2.10 was a large increase. Through the years it is evident that the minimum wage is constantly changing. “. It has averaged $6.60 an hour in purchasing power in 2013 dollars. But it has ranged from a low of $3.09 an hour in late 1948 to a high of $8.67 an hour in 1968(Sherk, J. (2013, June 25).
With the current minimum wages throughout the states, employees are unable to provide safe and comfortable housing for their families. An example of this would be in the state of California. As of January 2, 2018, the minimum wage for employees in California was $10.50 an hour (Division of Labor). These rates equally correlate with the increasing average price of housing in California. Today, the average home in California is priced at nearly two and a half times more than the average national home price of $180,000 (Taylor 3). There is no feasible way for employees to afford safe and comfortable living conditions with the income that they are generating from the current minimum wage. With people being unable to afford such high housing costs,
Since the mid-1970s, affordable housing has become increasingly difficult to find. This is because Americans are being asked to contribute more and more or their paychecks to their rent and when they become homeless it is difficult to get themselves back into affordable housing. It has been reported that “A full-time worker earning minimum wage cannot afford a one-bedroom unit priced at the Fair Market Rent anywhere in the United States. Nationally a full-time worker must earn $18.32 per hour to afford a two-bedroom apartment at Fair Market Rent.”(National low-income Housing Coalation 2010) Today, our federal minimum wages contributes to our increasing homeless population, while even if you work fulltime making $7.25 isnt even enough to get you off the street. In 1970 there was a...
The “Fair” Work Commission has ruled that over six hundred and fifty thousand Australians working in retail and hospitality, would have their penalty rates diminished at the government's decisions to scrap weekend penalty rates. Unfortunately for some workers, they are amongst the lowest paid in the country and as a result of, Sundays and public holidays, essentially a day for Australians to “rest”, will have workers on those days being paid less. Many Australians will become disheartened by this decision as Australia swears to have a proud nation of democracy and many of our workers who already are enduring assiduous physical work at a very low pay already will have their pay slashed even further.
A person working at minimum wage will only make about $10,700 a year. When rent, groceries, bills and gas are all added up, it appears to be a nearly impossible task to keep a family afloat. But working 40 hours a week at $5.15 an hour, one makes less than $206 a week after taxes. Making $206/week, one brings home about $824/month. Adding 17 gallons of gas at $2.20 a gallon in a car; the cost ends up to be about $38 a week, $152/month. The gas and electricity bill about $120, $50 for cable, $147 for property taxes, $45 for the telephone bill, $25 for water, and $42 for house insurance. All this totals about $580 (Abrams, H). Making it difficult to afford cable, and make the smallest payment possible on all the bills causing one to slip into debt. This is reality for many of the people in the United States. At the current minimum wage level, a full time, year round minimum wage worker in 2005 will earn $5,378 less than the $16,090 needed to lift a family of three out of poverty (Minimum).
Minimum wage is the lowest compensation that employers may legally pay to workers and as of July 2016, the federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. Which when calculated for a week, 40-hour job, would equal $290, this amount after taxes would be barely enough for transportation (car or a Metrocard), food, healthcare, kids and/or pets and even laundry. Federal labor statistics suggest that minimum-wage earners are more often part-time youth, including college students and working parents, who may be laboring for additional money but not for their survival. While making below $15,000 a year is barely sufficient for high school students and college kids, it is not enough to successfully live on or raise families.
A statistic reveals that “the 2013 Housing Wage is $18.79, exceeding the $14.32 hourly wage earned by the average renter by almost $4.50 an hour, and greatly exceeding wages earned by low income renter households” (“Homelessness in America”). People are not making enough money to pay for their houses or apartments causing them to abandon their houses. Interviewed by James Baram, shelter owner Brenda Wilson says “It’s really bad. We have more new homeless people than we’ve ever had — people who lost their jobs and lost their homes via foreclosure” (Baram). According to the article published in the American Journal of Public Health, in 2010, more than 20.2 million households were spending half their income to pay for housing. This lead to an increase of about 21.8 million households who decided to share a living unit with other families (Shinn, et al.). This means that a worker making minimum wage would be unable to buy a two-bedroom apartment anywhere in the United States (“Hunger and Homelessness”). This defeats the purpose of minimum wage because minimum means the smallest amount needed to get by; however, none of these homeless individuals are making enough to get by. Not only are the prices of houses decreasing, but the ability to get a job has also decreased. From 2014 to 2015, almost 400,000 people had lost their job. With no job these people were forced to leave their houses and find a shelter to live in (“Homelessness in America”). While these people had stability, many people were born into poverty. In 2014, “the number of poor renter households experiencing severe housing cost burden, those households in poverty paying more than 50 percent of their income toward housing, totaled 6.6 million, increasing 2.1 percent nationally from 2013, with 33 states seeing an increase” (Batko). First people are not making enough money to pay for their houses. Then,
Many people say that it’s the homeless people’s fault for living on the street, but even a job at McDonalds could not earn them enough money to pay for an apartment. In the median state a minimum-wage worker would have to work 87 hours each week to afford a two-bedroom apartment at 30% of his/her income. The remaining 70% of the income, would then go to their child (if they had one), groceries, gas (and that’s if they have a car), bus fare, and miscellaneous items (National Low Income Housing Coalition, 1998).
For the past three decades minimum wage has been seen to rise several times. Only helping some but more than anything harming most. So who are the ones feeling the effects? Certainly not the wealthy, it never is them, mainly it would be the working poor, unskilled and teenagers. Raising minimum wage would cripple the public even more than what it would actually help.