Mar
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Wages and Myths- Class # 15 Blog post Nicholas Lee
March 19, 2015 | Leave a Comment
Once again, these three articles discuss the controversy of raising the minimum wage throughout the country. These articles bring about an interesting debate about the minimum wage. After reading these articles, a few points stood out to me that I was not expecting. One of them was in the guardian article. Although I was aware that the minimum wage for restaurant workers was below the standard minimum wage, I never realized how low it really was. To find out that the federal minimum wage for waiters and waitresses is only $2.13 was very shocking and frankly didn’t make me angry, but made me feel disappointing in our society.
Although I was ambivalent about raising the minimum wage in other scenarios, in this case, I do agree that the minimum wage should be raised for food workers. Although these workers do get tips, as stated in the guardian article, this type of income can vary greatly from day to day, week to week and month to month, while expenses like rent and food don’t. This article made me realize how difficult it can be to work in the service industry, not knowing if they will be be able to pay your bills or not because it depends on tips.
As stated by Sara Jayaraman in the guardian article, basically the restaurants want it’s customers to pay for it’s workers. In my opinion, the idea of tipping is archaic and obsolete. Why not just pay their workers a fair wage and raise the price of the product (as is in every other industry)? It doesn’t make sense why we have this system in motion in our country. In other countries, like China, Korea and Japan, tipping is actually considered insulting and almost like a bribery. A price is a price. Why pay more when the service is included?
When I started reading the Goodman article in Forbes, I was a bit skeptical on his claim that pretty much, income inequality is not an issue in our country because people aren’t “complaining” about it. Unfortunately, after reading the article, I am still skeptical about his claims and frankly his credibility on where he is getting his reasoning and justification of these claims from. After re-reading the article, I am still trying to figure out how he calculated the increased income for the average family. There are some part of his argument that I do agree with though like his myth how raising the minimum wage will be a remedy to income inequality. Even if the minimum wage were to increase, I don’t think this would end our poverty either. I think there are other factors in motion that we would have to consider.
This brings me to my last point on Crain’s article, Living Wage. As stated in the article, government officials are pushing to raise the minimum wage to be the single remedy to our poverty and income inequality issues. While this may help some, there are many factors that we have to consider. Who would really be benefiting from this and who will be liable to pay for these increases in minimum wage? I think raising the minimum wage in some cases may be useful (like in the case of restaurant and service workers) but it can’t be our only solution to the income inequality.
