Minimum Wage Benefits Workers and Doesn't Decrease Employment

Categories: Economy Minimum Wage Politics

Essay, Pages 3 (665 words)

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In this world political decisions are among countries sometimes follow the rules of the childhood game of "follow the reader." Everyone takes turns being the leader so when one government comes up with a brilliant idea everyone tags along behind, changing their laws to be the same and add up to the enemy. It was just the same with the minimum wage laws. The United States enacted the law in the1938 after a few other countries had first. This law was enacted as a matter of social justice, to reduce exploitation and assure workers can afford basic living expenses and necessities, not to increase unemployment among low wage, unskilled workers.

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Not to harm the employment rate, but to help.

When you have minimum wage laws they have to change at some point, whether its due to inflation or even the consumer price index. It's like a physics experiment done on earth, as opposed to doing it on the moon. The gravitational acceleration on the moon is different from that on the earth, which affects the results, but the results change in proportion to how they would change on earth, which makes everything equal out and end up the same problem, no difference.

In Source B it is stated that politicians link the minimum wage laws to the consumer price index, thereby producing small annual increases rather than larger wage hikes. This is the case with the wage laws in Oregon.

No proof has been given that minimum wage laws make any difference in the unemployment rate.

In Source C it tells about David Card and Alan Krueger, and the research they've done, they wrote the book Myth and Measurement: The New Economics of the Minimum Wage, which argued the bad employment effects of minimum wage laws to be "minimal to non-existent." These two looked at increase in New Jersey and California's minimum wage rates; Card and Krueger both present evidence that increases in the minimum wage only increased pay, but still no loss in jobs. Even though critics have argued their points, and said they were flawed in their research, Card and Krueger still overcame the criticism and stuck by the evidence they obtained. The research was obtained fair and square, so it still stands.

Now-a-days buyers have the power over sellers. Which is considered a market failure, and results in workers "being paid less than their marginal value," as stated in Source C. Under these assumptions of the power of the buyer, if the minimum wage is set accordingly it will increase employment and wage, if the level is equal to the averages of labor. Source C's theoretical arguments, make sense in a manner of turning the facts around and stretching it out, it explains thoroughly how the productivity of labor" and the wages and employment increases tie together and make things right when acquired properly.

Low wage workers more benefit from these so-called harmful minimum wage laws. If you have an applicant with no experience, it wouldn't be fair to not train them well and just pay them poorly, it's only fair if you train them well and pay them averagely, and with that set minimum wage, you know they are not being mistreated. The college graduates with higher levels of education shouldn't be working minimum wage jobs anyways, they need to apply for more of what they're worth. If you spend years of your life in school striving for your goals then throw it away at a minimum wage job, then what went wrong? Therefore minimum wage is a law that low-wage workers benefit from, and help them get what they deserve, and it doesn't decrease employment, because there are still people in the world who are opening up new businesses everyday, and that's why our economy is growing, improving and becoming more amazing every day.