A higher wage should be earned through higher education and skillset, not because of a government mandate. Teenagers working at fast food restaurants over summer break should not be making the same wage as a parent working at a small business to support their children. When I got my first job at seventeen, making minimum wage was acceptable because I had very few personal expenses. Getting older, I have worked my way to a higher wage by searching and interviewing for higher paying jobs. Once I complete college, I hope to be able to use my skills to be able to find a job to support a family.
If I had started making a minimum wage of fifteen dollars an hour, as suggested by Nick Hanauer in his article “A threat, not a theory” (Hanauer), my incentive to work harder to figure out a career path would have been dampened. I needed the motivation of improving my skillset to be able to make a higher wage. However, some people with higher skillsets are still working minimum wage, and this is a problem. There needs to be a stronger push for fair pay for skilled workers, but minimum wage should not be the way we achieve this.
…show more content…
In an article written by Jeffery Clemens and Michael Wither from the University of California- San Diego, I quote “In addition to reducing employment, we find that binding minimum wage increases the likelihood that individuals work without pay (by roughly 2 percent.)” (Clemens). In May of 2017, the Congressional Progressive Caucus proposed the Raise the Wage Act of 2017, suggesting that minimum wage be raised to fifteen dollars an hour (Compensation). However, an analysis showed that a majority of the people who backed the bill had unpaid interns (Compensation). If government cannot afford to pay their interns fifteen, they should not push this onto the private sector of the