Blog Post #10

March 23, 2015 | Leave a Comment

Not only is the fact that more Americans are dropping out of the workplace, but also the fact that the employed workers have reached a plateau with their wage, as evidenced by this line, “For most Americans who are employed, another challenge has been very slow wage growth…” That makes it seem possible that even more Americans will drop out because of the slow wage growth.

I found the article about faster job creation faster in states with higher minimum wage interesting. I wonder if that implies a causation effect, or it’s simply a correlation. Even the article states that the data can’t indicate cause and effect, but if it is indeed the case then this would be really helpful in supporting the reason for increasing minimum wage. Out of the 13 states that raised minimum wage, only New Jersey didn’t have employment gains, and they actually had the largest negative change in employment. This makes me question what happened, especially since New Jersey was one of the 4 states that passed legislation to increase minimum wage.

Seeing the chart and how California and Nevada were still at the top even without raising minimum wage makes me wonder if the other states will ever reach that level as well. For example, New York’s and California’s minimum wage isn’t that much different but New York is on the bottom half of the chart while California is at the top.

The two articles (“Job Growth is Sluggish” and “2014 Job Creation”) seem to contradict one another. The former was written after the latter, which suggests that even though the minimum wage increased, there was still a lot of workers who left the job market. An explanation for this could be how the workers from the states that didn’t increase minimum wage were the ones who left rather than the workers from the states that raised minimum wage. I personally hope the latter article prevails and that the employment continues to rise.

One of the articles mentioned how there was debate over why so many Americans were leaving the job market, and that new technologies could be a possible reason for it. However, technology might not be to blame, but rather how people are being moved to different countries whose workers require much lower wages. A lot of other articles written in 2015 have been talking about how job employment was increasing while the wage remained the same, which contradicts what the same article about how job growth was sluggish. That’s promising though, the fact that in four or so months, over 200,000 jobs were added. Now the thing that we have to worry about is how to also raise the minimum wage.

-Margaret Wang



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