When President Barack Obama used his executive authority to raise the wages for Federal Contract workers, he said, “No one working full-time in the world’s richest nation should be poor.”
Minimum wage has to be raised because hard-working people are kept in poverty as a result. History proves this and, as a man who lives on two minimum wage jobs, I understand this all too well.
Many Republicans believe that raising the minimum wage would cause an increase in inflation and lead to less demand for jobs. They also believe that the solution to the unemployment rate is to give tax incentives and tax breaks to corporations, thinking that if corporations do well they will provide tons of jobs to American workers. This is also known as the trickle-down theory. However, these ideas are nothing more than a dream.
During the early years of the Great Depression, President Herbert Hoover believed that the economy would eventually fix itself and that government intervention would destroy America’s free enterprise. Hoover chose to do nothing for the first few years of his presidency, leaving America starving. It wasn’t until President Franklin D. Roosevelt came into office that the government intervened.
Minimum wage was initially created under the Roosevelt administration as a part of the National Industrial Recovery Act to help the economy recover from the Great Depression. The Recovery Act was a roaring success.
This, in combination with a few other congressional actions, pulled America out of the depression.
Even before the depression, moguls like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller treated their workers horribly. Employees were paid the lowest wages possible, giving workers more than 10-hour shifts at a time when there was no social security, no minimum wage, no unions or job security. Yet, even with all the wealth that businesses generated, that wealth didn’t spread to the working man. The trickle-down theory is a myth.
Fiscal conservatives are the primary opponents of minimum wage because they are trying to preserve business freedom. However, they forget that most business leaders are primarily concerned with personal profit, not the economy or the working man. As long as they are profiting, these business moguls are pretty much unaffected. According to a calculation study done by Sentier, when adjusted for inflation, the rising value of currency,
American incomes have fallen 8 percent since the start of 2000.
Bloomberg Businessweek columnist Peter Coy, in his article “$10.10: Get beyond the political noise, and there’s a strong case for a 40 percent boost in the minimum wage” said, “Most students in school are taught in neoclassical economics that setting the price of labor above its equilibrium level causes supply to exceed demand and leads to more unemployment. But as Doyne Farmer once wrote, ‘If one were to go through any standard introductory economics textbook, and color every statement pink with weak empirical confirmation, most of the book would be pink.’”
Those who believe that an increase in minimum wage would lead to an increase in inflation are also misled. I have worked in service jobs for the past three years and even if the unit prices went up by 50 cents, prices would still bring in massive profits for the retail and grocery stores.
Let’s say that Walmart pays 10 cents for a can of Campbell’s soup. After it’s put on the shelf, Walmart sells the can for $1.25. So even if that unit price went up to 50 cents a can, Walmart would still be profiting from this sale.
Also, while working at Walmart, I noticed that the average worker’s salary is $435 every two weeks. And while working as a cashier, I realized that the average customer there spends between $150 to $250 per transaction.
The store makes enough to pay one worker’s paycheck, which is about two weeks of work, within two or three transactions, sometimes less. Taking into consideration the cost of overhead, the store makes enough money for one worker’s salary within three minutes.
Do the math and it’s easy to see that the store can make enough to pay all of its workers within one hour. This reminds me of one of Roosevelt’s quotes: “Do not let any calamity-howling executive with an income of $10,000 a day … tell you … that a wage of $11 a week is going to have a disastrous effect on all American industry”.
I did a few final register counts with some managers before my shift ended and I saw that the Walmart I worked at made $200,000 a day. I now work at Publix and the amount people spend there per transaction is about the same. Clearly, these big businesses can afford an increase in minimum wage, simply because of their massive profit intake.
Fiscal conservatives believe that the liberal argument of raising minimum wage is more about liberals believing that it’s morally wrong to pay workers poverty wages. Well, those who believe this forget the reason minimum wage was created: to make sure that American citizens make a living wage. With the cost of everything going up, most people have to secure two or three jobs to just survive. I’m not talking about just those with families to support; I’m talking about average people. Even those with specialized educational skills have to work minimum wage jobs because middle class, higher paying jobs are no longer plentiful. This is not right.
What’s worse is workers, like myself, who live on minimum wage have to volunteer to work 10, sometimes 15-hour shifts simply because they need to earn more to pay off a house bill. Most minimum wage jobs do not provide necessary benefits either, such as medical insurance or sick leave.
America is supposed to be the land of the free and home of the brave. However, with the economy the way it is, and minimum wage this low, businesses essentially have slave labor.
The worst part about it is that, since Florida is a right-to-work state, employers can fire a worker for any reason and they don’t have to disclose the reason to them. So, if a worker tries to speak out against their low pay, with the economy this bad, employers can just replace him or her with any of the many available unemployed people that desperately need the job. I’m not saying that raising the minimum wage can change all of this, but it is a good start.
