Limited Opportunities in America for Those with Minimum Wages

Topics: Minimum wage, Poverty, Wage Pages: 2 (564 words) Published: June 10, 2008
Opportunities in America, especially for those who have minimum wages and big families to support, are very limited. Jonathan Kozol presented a speech about poverty in America. In this, he talked about his experiences staying in a homeless center in New York, one of the wealthiest places in the nation, and how he “never found his way back home.” The people are easily unseen and greatly forgotten. Because of this, families in poverty do not get the same possibilities as wealthier people do. Opportunities in America should be equal for all people and to do this, actions need to be taken. The kinds of measures that need to be taken have to do with shelters, nourishment, and impartiality.

Kozol was inspired to visit the homeless because of an article written the night before Christmas 1985, which told about a boy who died because he was premature. This resulted because the mother did not have the proper nourishment and care. The baby was already living on the streets before he was even a year old. This is a revolting fact to realize that baby’s are being born on the filthy city streets and are not being provided with the proper care. Kozol decided to visit the mother of the baby in a homeless shelter. He celebrated the holidays with families in the shelter where the food was cooked off of hotplates, because there were no ovens. He also said that the average child was only six years old. The living conditions in a homeless shelter are very unsanitary and when you are a child your immune system is not that strong and it is very unhealthy. Kozol explained how one day he was in Las Angeles when he spotted a family living on the

streets. The mother came to Las Angeles to look for good rent but couldn’t find anything suitable enough. The husband was working in a sweatshop making only five hundred dollars a month, which is minimum wage. This was certainly not enough to pay for rent and support a family at the same time. Because of this, they were forced to live on...
Continue Reading

Please join StudyMode to read the full document

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Essay On Minimum Wage In America

    ...era the United States went through and how the nation could deal with it. Besides, The United States is known as practically the birthplace of opportunities, one of the main reasons why people in countries that are close to the United States decide to immigrate there is by the constant search for opportunities (jobs, education, a better way of living) that are promised; at the same time generates different problems ranging from unemployment to low salaries because of the available workforce. The work opportunities in the U.S. are infinite and immense but we’re gradually making life too hard to be living. According to Steven Rattner article “Americans between 18 and 34 are earning less today than the same age group did in the past.” This has being an issue that many Americans address as it affect us in our living situations such as education, work, and taxes; regarding the budget and their way of living. The minimum wage in the United States is $7.25 an hour, depending on the state, this relates on how each state differ with their income. However, the minimum wage doesn’t influence a big number of Americans; According to Sherk’s article “In 2011 and 2012, 3.7 million Americans reported earning $7.25 or less per hour-just 2.9 percent of all workers in the United States” thus, if just a small amount of people seem affected by minimum-wage how is this...

    Read More
    502 Words 3 Pages
  • America and the Minimum Wage Essay Example

    ... 1) Title of your research paper America and the Middle Wage 2) Introduction – The introduction should contain a ‘hook’, a general quote or interesting fact. Then two or three broad, general statements, and the thesis statement. The federal government has imposed a minimum wage since 1938, and nearly every the state impose their own minimum wages. These laws prevent employers from paying wages below a mandated level. While the aim is to help workers, decades of economic research show that minimum wages usually end up harming workers and the broader economy. Minimum wages particularly stifle job opportunities for low-skill workers, youth, and minorities, minimum wage is counterproductive and causes more harm than good. 3) Body of the paper - your three major points. Here you present the information you have collected, state the purpose of the topic, and assess its impact on the different economic actors. Various sources should be used and clearly listed. 1- Proponents of a higher minimum wage often argue that that it's difficult to support a family when the only breadwinner earns the current minimum wage. This claim is flawed, for a couple of reasons. First, for a...

    Read More
    1133 Words 5 Pages
  • Minimum Wage Essay

    ...Minimum Wage A high school student that has a job or is thinking about getting a job knows what minimum wage is because they know how little it is. Minimum wage is a set p/hr earnings an employer must pay his or her employees. Oregon is one of eighteen states in the U.S. that has set a higher minimum wage then the federal law of only $5.15 per/hr. For many years there has been a debate on weather or not highirng the minimum wage helps or hurts the economy, in most states with a higher minimum wage it has shown an increase in that states economy. When Bill Clinton was in office he gave the states the power to set their own minimum wages above the federal level. One reason why he chose to do this is because it would allow states to change according to what fit their needs the best. A living wage is how well a person can perform a standard of living. That of course depends on where you live and the different types you fall under. You may think how does the minimum wage affect our economy. Dose it help or not. Economists recently signed a statement stating that federal and state minimum wage increases "can significantly improve the lives of low-income workers and their families, without the...

    Read More
    1035 Words 5 Pages
  • Essay on minimum wage

    ...increases the minimum wage. The United States Congress adopted the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938. Congress created the minimum wage toward the end of the Depression era to ensure a "minimum standard oPremium 2048 Words 9 Pages Macroeconomics: Should the Minimum Wage Increase? Should the Minimum Wage Increase? Minimum wage is the lowest wage permitted by law or by a special agreement that can be applied for an employee or put simply, the lowest amount of pay that an employee can make. Governments set a minimum wage on businesses in hope for reduced poverty and increasePremium 1355 Words 6 Pages Should Minimum Wage Increase? Should Minimum Wage Increase? I have many reasons why I do not think minimum wage needs to increase at this time. We need to look at the reasons for minimum wage. We must look at the amount of time the current minimum wage has been in effect. The affect on the economy needs to be well...Premium 892 Words 4 Pages Persuasive Research on Minimum Wage Lee Prutsman Sarah Hannaway Expository 200 April 1, 2013 All About the Dollar Many Americans have very different beliefs on how our country...

    Read More
    1601 Words 7 Pages
  • Essay about Minimum Wage

    ...Minimum Wage In the United States Minimum Wage is approaching record lows. Even with recent increases inflation is one of the main reasons that workers are being paid less for labor than they were back in the Seventies. There are about 3 million workers in the United States that worked full time year round last year and still fell below the National poverty level. If everyone earns exactly the same amount of money, then the income distribution would be perfectly equal. If no one earns any money except for one person, who earns all of the money, then the income distribution would be perfectly unequal. In a normal society Income Distribution is usually somewhere in the middle of perfectly equal or unequal. When a small number of people start receiving a large portion of the income in a society, the government tries to find ways to redistribute income. Governments try to stop the rich from getting richer, and the poor from getting poorer in order to achieve a good balance in income distribution. Minimum wage laws are a way that the federal and state governments balance income distribution. 2. Minimum Wage is considered a price floor. Minimum wage laws determine the lowest price possible that any employer must pay for labor. In the traditional minimum wage model the quantity of supplied labor is...

    Read More
    524 Words 3 Pages
  • Minimum wage Essay

    ...Minimum wage in Nepalese Labor Market Minimum wage is the price floor imposed by the government for the welfare of labor. Price floor is the legal minimum on the price at which a good can be sold. It is an attempt by the government to maintain prices at other than equilibrium levels. When a government imposes a price floor, there will be two cases. One the price floor is not binding if the price floor is maintained below equilibrium price level. In this case, the market forces naturally move the economy to the equilibrium level and the price floor has no effect. In other case when price floor is above equilibrium level, such price floor is binding. In this case the market price equals price floor as government imposes such control on prices for the welfare of labors. At this point the quantity supplied exceeds the quantity demanded which results in surplus of labor i.e. unemployment. Since the supply is high some seller are unable to sell all they want at the market price. The sellers who appeals to personal biases of the buyer, perhaps due to racial or family ties, are better able to sell their goods than those who do not. By contrast, in a free market, the price serves as the rationing mechanism, and sellers can sell all they want at the equilibrium price. The impact of minimum wage rate depends on the skill and experience of workers. Highly experienced and...

    Read More
    1459 Words 6 Pages
  • the minimum wage Essay

    ...02/11/2014 Minimum Wage The minimum wage is a big problem in the U.S. “Assembly Votes to Increase California’s Hourly Minimum wage to $9.25” report how our state’s minimum wage would raise over the next few years: “Under AB 10, the hourly minimum wage would increase to $8.25 in 2014, $8.75 in 2015 and $9.25 in 2016” (Gutierrez A4). The president of Obama also supports this vote. He said: “It is time to raise the American people’s wage.” But there many people disagree this suggest. People believe if government raises the minimum wage that people could earn more money. According to the article “The Case for a Higher Minimum Wage,” “An estimated 27.8 million people would earn more money under the Democratic proposal to lift the hourly minimum from $7.25 today to $10.10 by 2016. And most of them do not fit the low-wage stereotype of a teenager with a summer job.” Today, everything of the price is rising, no matter car, house, food and gas. If the minimum wage didn’t rise, there will lots of people lose their families, and then people can’t keep their most basic life. Many people do the job of minimum wage, even some people need to work pick up a few jobs at the same time that maintain...

    Read More
    603 Words 3 Pages
  • Minimum Wage Essay

    ...Minimum Wage Increase The minimum wage must be raised today because the cost of living has gone up drastically. Education is essential today, and that price tag has increased drastically in the past twenty years as well. People should not have to fight for equal pay for equal work. Companies should be forced to pay their workers what they deserve, and that is more than minimum wage is now. With our new technology and the technology in the future work is harder and more complicated. A minimum wage increase would raise the wages of many workers and increase benefits to those disadvantaged workers. Because the cost of living has sky rocketed, it has become almost impossible to raise a family on a minimum wage job. A person living on his or her own cannot survive on minimum wage budget. Minimum wage needs to be raised in order for people to adequately support themselves and their families. The first issue that needs to be emphasized, is the unemployment rate. Some people believe that if the minimum wage is raised it will increase the rate of unemployment. This statement is false. It actually is incredibly beneficial. “The unemployment rate went from 3.8% in 1967 to 3.6% in 1968 to 3.5% in 1969,” when the...

    Read More
    914 Words 3 Pages

Popular Essays

Become a StudyMode Member

Sign Up - It's Free