Minimum Wage - The Dubious Policy :: essays papers

Minimum Wage The problematical Policy As early as 6.00 am in a dark and cold morning of Midwest winter, a hardly a(prenominal) race notching on an icy sidewalk. Under chilling wind, those pot walk to a large, old building. Inside the building, the people work for repetitive, backbreaking impoverished waged jobs. In the same day, late at night, you can see akin scene some people walking out of the building beneath heavy snowstorm.Being one of those people, I know the feeling of a minimum waged worker. Like all of those workers, I feel exhausted by and by finishing my job. Everyday, I wait with impatience to hear my supervisor vocalise That is it, turn off the belt. After put off my safety gloves and puff my sweat, I can only think to return to my room and sleep. I lost most of my time and energy just for a few dollars. There are a lot of people that work harder and get less than me. The poor, especially less-skilled workers, has access only to faulty jobs at bad wages (Blank 64). Those workers always face bad situation. They are poor. They are attempt to sustain the life of their families. On the contrary, the owners of the company where they work have a high standard of living. Bad wage is advantageous for the group of people known as traditional elites who own labor-intensive firms because it lowers production cost, thusly increase the competitiveness of the product. For that reason, it is natural for the traditional elites to keep wage as low as possible. This action creates what Karl Marx wrote in The Communist Manifesto as naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation (82).The minimum wage seems to be an appealing beginning against these abusive exploitations. Applying a minimum wage law, government can pound a wealth distribution among the owners and their lowest level workers. On Saturday, June 25, 1938, The U.S. social intercourse first instituted a minimum wage with the Fair Labor standardised Act. The minimum wage was set at 25 c ents per working mo (US Department of Labor). The federal minimum wage is increase overtime, adjusted for higher(prenominal) living cost due to accumulated inflation. The minimum wage level is currently set at $5.15 per working hour (2001). An increase in minimum wage can help the poor by unquestionable amount. A 75-cent per hour increase in the minimum wage essence an additional $1,500 for a minimum wage earner who works full-time, twelvemonth round as much as the average family spends on groceries in 6 months (Bureau of Labor Statistics).