As a high school teenage girl, I demand a lot. Food, clothing, technology, a car, (etc). Except there is one problem. Those demands come with a literal price: money, which I don't have a lot of to satisfy my increasing desires. So, like any parent of a teenager would say, "Get a job" was my parents way of basically telling me I had to pay for the unnecessary materials myself. After a summer job of barely getting paid minimum wage and relying mostly on tips, I realized I should not be complaining of receiving minimum wage with my parents financial support. There are plenty of Americans who rely on getting paid minimum wage to live on. And $7.25 an hour is not a pretty number to be receiving as a salary. Christine Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project, and Richard Trumka, president of the AFL- CIO, wrote this article about the ludicrousness of the minimum wage using statistics, comparisons, and examples.
The article begins with a fact from the U.S. Census Bureau that structures the points that the middle-class has not been well-treated since the Great Recession. Following that, a statistic, "almost all, 95%, of the income gains from 2009 to 2012, the first three years of recovery from the Great Recession, went to the very richest 1%" (Owens) to support the unfair distribution of income gains. Multiple statistics follow to maintain the focus that the minimum wage for 2013 is unreasonable and cannot be relied on for a middle-class American family. Along with statistics, comparisons are used to compare how low the wage is now, to what it should be with inflation. "If the minimum wage had just kept pace with inflation since 1968, it would be $10.77 an hour today instead of $7.25" (Owens). Including this comparison encapsulates the logic as to why the minimum wage price is so unfair, and why it makes sense to raise it. To wrap everything together, the authors include a real example of just how cruel this legal price is to an average American. They introduce Carman Iverson, a 28-year old mother of four working at McDonald's earning $7.35 an hour. She makes about $400-$600 a month, not even able to pay her rent, $650 a month. Including Iverson's hardships in her life due to the low wage makes the audience feel for the Americans that are unable to get a higher-paying job, and want the American economy to be adjusted to help those Americans suffering on minimum wage. A mother of four like Iverson making $7.35 an hour barely earns enough to stay on time for rent, relying on the government for food stamps. A teenage girl like me, living in the suburbs of Philadelphia, upset about the minimum wage because I want to buy a nice car for myself...well, learning about Iverson was just a small slap in the face. And the article proves itself, living on $7.25 an hour really is not a living.
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