Minimum Wage Benefits

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According to Merriam Webster’s dictionary, minimum wage is defined as the least amount of money the government can pay a person on a job per hour. Over many years there has been much debate about the minimum wage. Individuals may say that it’s an easy solution to increase it; however, increasing the minimum wage does not beneficially affect all people. Raising the minimum wage could be a detriment to some people. These defendants of a lower minimum wage argue that if the wage gets higher, the cost of operating stores and companies would increase; therefore, prices of products within these stores would rise. On the other hand, the minimum wage would be beneficial to lower income families because it would aid them in living their life better…show more content…
The minimum wage was established by the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938. When this was established, the minimum wage started at twenty-five cents an hour and then increased to forty cents an hour by 1945. Since then, the minimum wage has increased tremendously to seven dollars and twenty-five cents an hour. This act also gave children the right to have minimum wage. There were several purposes of the minimum wage, but the most important one was that it helped balance the economy while it created a minimum standard of living for employees. With this new minimum standard of living, people’s lives were improved. The minimum wage has overcome many obstacles from being an all-time low into becoming an all-time high,…show more content…
Living with the minimum wage is a very difficult task. The article, “Why We Strike,” reiterates this point when it states, “We can barely pay our bills and put food on the table for our families.” In addition, the minimum wage is not enough for workers to get by. Marina Krakovsky also illustrates this when she states, “…there isn’t a single U.S. state in which people earning $7.25 per hour can afford the rent for a two-bedroom apartment, assuming they are spending 30 percent of their income on housing, which tends to be the nationwide norm.” Krakovsky also describes that to afford a two-bedroom apartment a person would have to work up to 117 hours per week. Jobs types also play a major role in affecting the minimum wage. The types of companies these employees work for include restaurants, gas stations, consumer goods stores, etc. Working at these places may be beneficial, but a person cannot live prominently without another job. Also, the quality of these jobs is not sometimes in the best conditions which is another negative besides the low minimum

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