AFL: Minimum Wage

Response: Raising the minimum wage

The desire to help individuals earn a decent living and live a higher quality life is certainly laudable. Also, the increased costs of living, including food, housing, and transportation, particularly in major urban locations indicate that an increase in the minimum wage is a necessity, and any move to increase the wage should be praised. However, the modest increase in the minimum wage will only create modest results. It will not help individuals making their living escape dead-end, low-paying jobs in the long-term. Workers making the minimum wage will still often be forced to work two jobs, perhaps two part-time jobs that do not pay benefits. Nor will the proposed increase their level of opportunity and mobility in American society.

Greater access to worker training and higher education is the real solution to the problem of the permanent underclass of working poor. True, many workers laboring at the minimum wage are young, and not self-supporting (like college and high school students), but those lawmakers who seek to engage in true, positive, meaningful social engineering and change the lives of the long-term working poor must change the way that society attempts to help this class of long-term minimum wage employees break the poverty cycle. While it will certainly be helpful, especially given the cuts in student loans, for young people trying to work their way through college with their parent's help, a raise in the minimum wage is simply one step in what must become a greater war on poverty and its causes. Teach a worker to fish for a lifetime, not merely to eat a bit better on a slightly better wage for one day. Increase access to job training, institute a health care system so that low-wage workers will not have to divert their salaries to such costs, and create more access to safe and affordable day care to make the increase in the minimum wage meaningful, and not just minimal improvement.