Minimum Wage
Essay by 24 • May 29, 2011 • 502 Words (3 Pages) • 1,385 Views
Minimum Wage
Minimum wage these days has been a big issue for a lot of people. Citizens have been fighting for a raise since 1997 the last time it was raised. A minimum wage is by law the lowest amount that an employer can make doing their specified job. Now you will know all the details, opinions, research, and all the statistics that have been found about about minimum wage.
A person working at minimum wage for 40 hours a week, all 52 weeks a year, only makes $10,712. Right now 11 million Americans are working at minimum wage. 75% of these people are adults and 40% are the supporters of the family. This now leads to poverty. About 40% of American children grow up living in poverty.
The minimum wage was established back in 1938 where it was set at 25 cents an hour. The minimum wage was lower at the beginning of 2007 than at any time since 1955. May 24, 2007, the congress passed a bill raising the federal minimum wage to $7.25 in three phases over two years. A full time minimum wage worker is almost even impossible to rent a one bedroom apartment with these rates.
The House of Representatives passed a measure that would have raised the minimum from $5.15 to $7.25 in three stages over the next three years. Poverty people on the other hand provide the labor force for many profitable businesses that depend on low wages, like fast-food restaurants and childcare for the kids of two-career families. Poor people don't vote much, but they do provide political benefits to other Americans, because they provide a convenient scrape goat for our institutional failures. With this said, the minimum wage is a way of maintaining a constant supply of poor people, which increases the demand for more minimum wage jobs.
On the other hand, advocates for increasing the minimum wage argue that it would benefit the working families. And because it does not go up automatically with inflation,
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