Against Minimum Wage

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Minimum wage is the lowest legal wage, or price floor, that employers may pay to workers. Minimum wage laws are in place to help protect workers.1 There are differences of opinions on the drawbacks and benefits of having a minimum wage in effect.
Those who support the minimum wage believe it increases the standard of living of the employees, reduces poverty and inequality, boosts morale and forces businesses to be more economically efficient. Those who are against the minimum wage say it increases poverty and unemployment, and in the long run is damaging to businesses. Businesses that mainly rely on unskilled labor, as a result of a minimum wage, experience increases in wage expenses. A minimum wage basically takes away a company’s ability …show more content…
If a company can’t pay its workers enough to live on, the company creates economic hardships on the community because it is dependent on the welfare system. The minimum wage is necessary to protect taxpayers from the very real desire of companies to get something for nothing. A simple argument for minimum wage legislation goes like this. From companies’ point of view, when there is unemployment they have little incentive to pay wages high enough to live on. And from workers’ point of view, they have little incentive to demand higher wages, especially if the consequence might be unemployment. If there is no minimum wage the co-existence of unemployment with in-work benefits drives down wages to below the level needed to live on. As the majority of government tax income comes from households, not companies, over time this becomes impossible to sustain economic growth for individuals or companies: all unskilled workers become in effect employees of the system, and the higher skilled are forced to subsidize the wages of the unskilled through rising taxes. There would eventually be calls for employers to cut in-work benefits. Unskilled workers would be subject to the stereotype and accusations of laziness or living off the system as the unemployed and homeless already receive. Arguments that the unemployed choose to “live off the system” imply that unemployment is a choice. If it is, then it cannot really be seen as a realistic threat. If the unemployed can refuse work without cost or consequence, then unemployment benefits actually become a minimum wage and there is no need for additional laws concerning minimum wages. Unemployment benefits may actually act as a MAXIMUM wage when there is long lasting unemployment, since a worker demanding higher wages can always be replaced at close to unemployment-benefit levels. We
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