Minimum Wages. Comm/215 Essentials of College Writing

Minimum Wages

Sandra Matterson

Comm/215 Essentials of College Writing

November 13, 2014

Kate McCarty

Minimum Wages

Minimum wage is defined as "the lowest wages permitted by law or by a special agreement (such as one with a labor union)". Minimum wage is a controversial topic in economics and politics because there are good and bad intentions behind it.

Many employers are against the increase of minimum wages, especially ones with a large amount of minimum wage workers. Although some employers agree that employees deserve an increase. When an employer has a business that gets big enough to need additional employees, they hire more since they are unable to do the work themselves. The goal is the additional money they bring in must be more than what they are paying their staff. As a business owner what can you do? If you raise prices it will drive customers a way. Some companies have created automated services likes self-check out to prevent paying higher wages to workers. $10.00 equals one fast food meal, 2 gallons of milk and a loaf of bread, or a little over two gallons of gas. Which now they want to add taxes on our gas. With minimum wage at the current rate you must work one hour to earn the ten dollars that only supply you with small necessities for everyday living. And in order to make it in this economy you would either have to work over-time just to make ends meat. So for example: I make $10.50 an hour and I tend to work between 90-120 hours in a two week pay, part-time notary business that I also have, and my husband works part-time. Working just my regular hours wouldn’t really help us, so I take all the over-time that I can get, and on top of that I drive two in a half hours total round trip just for work. So I ask this question; is minimum wage the cause of poverty?

Our country is held together by the families that work their butts off. With the current minimum wage (just from an increase from 8.25) we still have over half of our working...