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Effects of low minimum wage
Effects of low minimum wage
The Effects of a Minimum-Wage Increase on Employment and Family Income
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In Maine, there are twenty-five known welfare queens. If that does not brighten up your day, then it would be essential to know that there are two more on the way. Yes, that is right. Soon, we will be up to twenty-seven welfare queens doing what they do best. Waste the American taxpayers money. In Maine, Wal-Mart has topped employers with the largest number of workers on MaineCare, Food Stamps and Temporary Assistance For Needy Families. These workers, particularly the associates, are not being lazy. Rather, they are forced into the country's safety net programs with Wal Mart's low wages.
When a business pays the average employee an annual pay of $15,576, how is someone expected to survive. Fifteen thousand dollars for a family of two is below the poverty level, which is at $15,730. Therefore, the family of two would be able to sign up for both SNAP and Medicaid, as a major requirement to be on these programs is if the income falls below a certain level. For SNAP it is 130% above the poverty line that will make a person become eligible for it. While, for Medicaid, eligibility corre...
Wallechinsky demonstrates the many hardships that families and individuals go through. “Almost two-thirds say they live from paycheck to paycheck, and 47% say that no matter how hard they work, they cannot get
The primary problem would be the structure of the organization. This is due to the fact that there are thirteen departments in total which would lead to the failure of the ability to concentrate on long term viability of the business.
breadwinners of the family and rely on little assistance from others to make ends meet. Paycheck
Present day Federated consists of both Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s stores and operates in 34 states as well as Guam and Puerto Rico. While Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s provide both private and national brands and are similar in merchandising categories (men’s, women’s and children’s apparel, home décor, shoes, beauty, and accessories), they differ greatly in culture. Bloomingdale’s, being more upscale, targets consumers that are more concerned with trend and quality than they are price. Macy’s targets the more value oriented consumer and represents a broader Federated clientele. Macy’s represents 423 of the 459 Federated locations while Bloomingdale’s represents only 36 locations. Because I can better relate to the value conscious consumer of the Macy’s division and because they represent such a large portion of Federated, I will further explore their current characteristics and behaviors that suggest that they possess qualities of both monopolistic competition and oligopolies.
Wal-mart is currently the world’s largest company. It has seen continuous growth and financial success since it was founded in 1962. Today it is living off of a previous reputation of solid ethical business practices that are no longer being exercised. Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-mart, was considered to be “freakishly cheap… Cost-cutting was an obsession in the Wal-mart culture… on business trips, everyone, including the boss, flew coach, and hotel rooms were always shared.” (reclaimdemocracy.org. 2006). This was only part of the reason for Sam Walton’s success.
Welfare reform caused many families surviving with the help of the government to go out and look for jobs despite their need for childcare that they could not afford. Barbara Ehrenreich, a journalist with a PhD, decided to find out what life would be like living on minimum wage labor. During her journey, we see that labor has not changed majorly because laborers are not paid fairly and they are declining their rights. Although women are allowed in the workplace, an eight hour work day is established, and we have a minimum wage, many are still struggling to make it because the system simply does not work unless you are running the show. Her journey begins as she begins applying at many places in Key West, Florida, where she lives.
Though placing programs to help those Americans to get back on their feet, the money that was given to these programs was placed on budget cuts that would limit the amount of money given to each family for the month. According to welfareinfo.org, "an average expectation can be placed on a family of 4 receiving up to $900" a month, which may covers most of the expenses for the purchases of food and the renting of an apartment. However, if that family does not have the ability to obtain additional income, then the nine hundred dollars for a whole month will never help his or her family out of poverty. Additionally, for someone that has worked in a grocery store, a cashier can get a sense of average price to feed a family of four, which can be estimated between two-hundred and three-hundred per week. Especially with the cost of rent on top of grocery prices, it can really cause a family a lot of problems. To demonstrate these points, when looking back at Jo Goodwin Parker 's piece, "What is Poverty?", she provides a good idea of why poverty can be so painful: "it was, and is, seven-eight dollars a month for the hour of us; that is all I ever can get. Now you know why there is no soap, no needles and thread, no hot water, no aspirin, no worm medic.... none of these things forever and ever and ever" (Parker
Being raised in a single-parent lower class home, I realize first-hand the need for welfare and government assistance programs. I also realize that the system is very complex and can become a crutch to people who become dependent and complacent. As a liberal American I do believe that the government should provide services to the less fortunate and resources to find work. However, as able-bodied citizens we should not become complacent with collecting benefits and it is the government’s job to identify people who take advantage of the system and strip benefits from people who are not making efforts to support themselves independently. I will identify errors that exist within the welfare system and several policy recommendations to implement a change that will counteract the negative conditions that currently exist.
Food stamp organizations help a variety of people from the disabled, single mothers, children and to those who cannot find—or are unable to—work. There are many out there who for some reason are unable to obtain necessary food, and without these programs, these people wouldn’t be able to survive in the money hungry world. Though these programs are put in place to ensure that people are being properly fed, there are people out there that think people use it only to abuse it. Single mothers are just one of the groups that gets a lot of harassment and are looked down upon. These individual’s are looked down upon due to the stereotypes and the overwhelming concern of them ruining the system due to a few. According to Poverty and the Homeless they said only 9 percent of single mothers stayed in there programs for more than seven years and less than 10 percent stayed more than eight years, also saying that most of them were young single mothers with children under the age of three (Williams). Single mothers are not the reason that the economy is going under, people just need an escape goat to blame so they don’t see their own ignorance. Mothers shouldn’t be wrongly accused for needing food stamps, because they could need them for a number of reasons. There are mothers out there that have been divorced and the husbands don’t pay child support. An article online talked about how this mother had recently separated from her husband and she was on food stamps. Her children didn’t know because she didn’t want to burden them with any more than they already had. She said, “I sold everything that wasn’t tied down. I eventually found three part-time jobs that would allow me to be with my sons when they got home from school, trying to keep their lives as structured and normal as possible — plus saving me $100+ a week in childcare, which is substantial when you make
The gap in wealth between the rich and the poor continues to grow larger, as productivity increases but wages remain the same. There were changes in the tax structure that gave the wealthy tax breaks, such as only taxing for social security within the first $113,700 of income in a year. For CEOs this tax was paid off almost immediately. Free trade treaties broke barriers to trade and resulted in outsourcing and lower wages for workers. In “Job on the Line” by William Adler, a worker named Mollie James lost her job when the factory moved to Mexico. “The job in which Mollie James once took great pride, the job that both fostered and repaid her loyalty by enabling her to rise above humble beginnings and provide for her family – that job does not now pay Balbina Duque a wage sufficient to live on” (489). When Balbina started working she was only making 65 cents an hour. Another huge issue lies in the minimum wage. In 2007, the minimum wage was only 51% of the living wage in America. How can a person live 51% of a life? Especially when cuts were being made in anti-poverty and welfare programs that were intended to get people on their feet. Now, it seems that the system keeps people down, as they try to earn more but their benefits are taken away faster than they can earn. Even when workers tried to get together to help themselves they were thrown
A person working at minimum wage will only make about $10,700 a year. When rent, groceries, bills and gas are all added up, it appears to be a nearly impossible task to keep a family afloat. But working 40 hours a week at $5.15 an hour, one makes less than $206 a week after taxes. Making $206/week, one brings home about $824/month. Adding 17 gallons of gas at $2.20 a gallon in a car; the cost ends up to be about $38 a week, $152/month. The gas and electricity bill about $120, $50 for cable, $147 for property taxes, $45 for the telephone bill, $25 for water, and $42 for house insurance. All this totals about $580 (Abrams, H). Making it difficult to afford cable, and make the smallest payment possible on all the bills causing one to slip into debt. This is reality for many of the people in the United States. At the current minimum wage level, a full time, year round minimum wage worker in 2005 will earn $5,378 less than the $16,090 needed to lift a family of three out of poverty (Minimum).
In 1945, Sam Walton opened his first variety store and in 1962, he opened his first Wal-Mart Discount City in Rogers, Arkansas. Now, Wal-Mart is expected to exceed “$200 billion a year in sales by 2002 (with current figures of) more than 100 million shoppers a week…(and as of 1999) it became the first (private-sector) company in the world to have more than one million employees.” Why? One reason is that Wal-Mart has continued “to lead the way in adopting cutting-edge technology to track how people shop, and to buy and deliver goods more efficiently and cheaply than any other rival.” Many examples exist throughout Wal-Mart’s history including its use of networks, satellite communication, UPC/barcode adoption and more. Much of the technology that was utilized helped Sam Walton more efficiently track what he originally noted on yellow legal pads. From the very beginning, he wanted to know what the customers purchased, what inventory was selling and what stock was not selling. Wal-Mart now “tracks on an almost instantaneous basis the ordering, shipment, and delivery of literally every item it sells, and that it requires its suppliers to hook into the system, enabling it to track most goods every step of the way from the time they’re made and packaged in the factories to when they’re carried out store doors by shoppers.” “Wal-Mart operates the world’s most powerful corporate computing system, with a capacity (as of late 1999) of more than 100 terabytes of data (A terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes, or roughly the equivalent of 250 million pages of text.).
Since the case was published, Best Buy has continued to be innovative and creative in building its relationships with its consumers. Per Best Buy’s website (2013), they have added a Windows store that allows customers to gain knowledge and test out Window devices. This shows their increased dedication to building the customer experience. Even with all the changes and dedication they have to their consumers, Best Buy has already closed the nine Best Buy stores that it set up in China (CNBC, 2011). However, Lee (2013) mentions that the CEO of Best Buy says it will keep its business in China under the Five Star brand.
McDonalds has always been a leader in the fast food industry. Through its dynamic market expansion, new products and special promotional strategies, it has succeeded in making a name for itself in the minds of the target customers. However, McDonald’s earnings has declined in the late 1990’s and 2000s. This is mainly due to a fiercely competitive industry and variety in customer tastes and preferences.
The other day I walked into the supermarket to buy a box of Kleenex. I was faced with a variety of colors, textures, box designs, and even the option of aloe. All these features designed for a product to blow my nose into! Selection wasn't limited to the Kleenex section, either…I found abundance in every aisle. We seem to always want more - more choices, more variety, more time. In fact, even the word "supermarket" implies a desire for more than just a simple market.