Currently minimum wage is $8, with a $1 increase coming on July 1 and another to raise it to $10 in January 2016. Although California is ahead of the game here, it cannot come fast enough to really help the struggling workers that live paycheck to paycheck.
Currently minimum wage is $8, with a $1 increase coming on July 1 and another to raise it to $10 in January 2016. Although California is ahead of the game here, it cannot come fast enough to really help the struggling workers that live paycheck to paycheck.
In reading many surveys, statistics and pros and cons in raising the minimum wage, the one thing that stands out is that most of the experts, on both sides, obliviously do not have to depend on a minimum wage job. If they did, the argument would be over. Supporters are too slow and opposition is out of touch with the reality of what it means to work hard at a ridiculously low price in a time of recession. Rise of inflation and large corporations that use the recession as a means to keep paying low wages to its workers, and hiring part-time to avoid overtime and benefits is common.
Food services, accommodation, retail, arts, entertainment and recreation, and administrative services are the top five low wage businesses. This is a large percentage of our local working population that deserves better pay.
Wages are not keeping up with rising cost. Since 2008, inflation on all goods raised 11.79 percent with 2009 being the only year that there was no rise in the cost of living.
Arguments against the minimum wage is that it will hurt small business, but in the overall look at small businesses, and for the mom and pop shop, that could be the case. But the majority of minimum wage employers are not small family businesses, they are large corporate businesses and franchises that are making plenty of money off the backs of its workers.
Wal-Mart employs 1.4 million Americans that are paid less than $10 per hour. Santee’s Wal-Mart is expanding to a super store and El Cajon is getting a new Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market on Second Street in which many small businesses fear for their ability to survive with a Wal-Mart in the vicinity.
And it is not like they are not making a profit. In the top three of Fortune 500 for the past three years, last year it netted $17.76 billion in profits. Other minimum wage businesses that have billion dollar profits and considered the greatest abusers of minimum wage workers are Yum! (Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, KFC), Target, Subway, TJ Maxx, Burger King and Sears.
With minimum wage employers, 92 percent are profitable, 78 percent profitable over the past three years and 75 percent have higher revenues than before the recession began. In the meanwhile, top executives rake in millions a year and over the past five years, shareholders were paid hundreds of trillions of dollars.
It is time that some of this profit goes to the people that make these industries profitable on an every day basis—the minimum wage worker.
Minimum wage cannot go up fast enough for these people and these large corporations need to take a hit and offer better employment. After all, you get what you pay for and in many cases this is obvious in the products they sell, but worse in the way they look at their employees.
If the people that defend low minimum wage had to live on that income for a month, I bet the debate over minimum wage would be over.
