William Warren's Political Cartoon Analysis

In William Warren’s political cartoon, “Minimum Wage Spike,” published in 2014 by Net Right Daily, powerfully depicts Warren’s viewpoint of President Obama’s attempts to raise minimum wage from the average eight dollars to a higher ten to fifteen dollars per hour. Although the cartoon is two years old, the context of this cartoon is still debated and relevant because it demonstrates the effects of raising minimum wage and the effects it will have on employees. The cartoon contains an arrow that represents the hike in minimum wage, or as Warren refers to it as a “spike,” that is impaling through a man with a label that reads “500k Jobs.” William Warren effectively discredits Obama’s proposal through the use of symbolism and analogy that attempts

Essentially, Washington D.C. was one of the cities that established raised wages. In Jason Russell’s article, D.C. Lost Restaurant Jobs After Min. Wage Hike, he describes the repercussions placed on employees once the minimum wage was raised. Russell explains that after Washington D.C.’s minimum wage rose to $10.50 an hour in 2015, increases in restaurant jobs failed to keep up with the quick growth it carried during the economic recovery and further explains how restaurant jobs fell by 1,400 in D.C. (Russell 1). This quotation reflects Warren’s cartoon by representing the symbols of the spike and the man being pierced; recalling that the spike in this picture is portrayed as the harm that will be caused to employees due to the hike in minimum wage, and the man representing minimum wage jobs. Russell explains how employment reduced once the wage was raised because restaurants were unable to pay all existing employees the new wage, so to be able to keep up with the wages, restaurants were forced to lay off employees to pay fewer amounts of workers. However, Russell continues to explain how the wage rose once again in July of 2016