Minimum Wage Benefits Workers and Doesn't Decrease Employment
Uploaded by sidneyolivia on Nov 17, 2008
In this world political decisions are among countries sometimes follow the rules of the childhood game of “follow the reader.” Everyone takes turns being the leader so when one government comes up with a brilliant idea everyone tags along behind, changing their laws to be the same and add up to the enemy. It was just the same with the minimum wage laws. The United States enacted the law in the1938 after a few other countries had first. This law was enacted as a matter of social justice, to reduce exploitation and assure workers can afford basic living expenses and necessities, not to increase unemployment among low wage, unskilled workers. Not to harm the employment rate, but to help.
When you have minimum wage laws they have to change at some point, whether its due to inflation or even the consumer price index. It’s like a physics experiment done on earth, as opposed to doing it on the moon. The gravitational acceleration on the moon is different from that on the earth, which affects the results, but the results change in proportion to how they would change on earth, which makes everything equal out and end up the same problem, no difference. In Source B it is stated that politicians link the minimum wage laws to the consumer price index, thereby producing small annual increases rather than larger wage hikes. This is the case with the wage laws in Oregon.
No proof has been given that minimum wage laws make any difference in the unemployment rate. In Source C it tells about David Card and Alan Krueger, and the research they’ve done, they wrote the book Myth and Measurement: The New Economics of the Minimum Wage, which argued the bad employment effects of minimum wage laws to be “minimal to non-existent.” These two looked at increase in New Jersey and California’s minimum wage rates; Card and Krueger both present evidence that increases in the minimum wage only increased pay, but still no loss in jobs. Even though critics have argued their points, and said they were flawed in their research, Card and Krueger still overcame the criticism and stuck by the evidence they obtained. The research was obtained fair and square, so it still stands.
Now-a-days buyers have the power over sellers. Which is considered a market failure, and results in workers “being paid less than their marginal value,” as...