Exploring American Workers' Challenges: Beyond Minimum Wage

Raising the Minimum Wage In an editorial written by Warren Buffett for the Wall Street Journal, according to S. Kumar in his article “America’s Workers Have Bigger Problems than the Minimum Wage” for Fortune Magazine, the problems that American workers face are far more than just attaining a livable wage. The three biggest problems that Americans face include the growing power of corporations, competition against technologies, and the growing income inequality that requires specialized skills where low-wage workers may not have education or capabilities to adapt. However, the minimum wage is still a serious problem, according to Roger Lowenstein. Lowenstein writes that the minimum wage does not provide a livable wage, which is a real problem when families are trying to survive on income that is too low even for an

However Lowenstein says that “there is a strong economic and moral case for a slow and steady increase”. The free market argument suggests that the classic supply and demand model that is taught in economics 101 is not representative of the way in which a labor market behaves. People behave according to what economists and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman, co-authored with Jack Knetsch and Richard Thaler wrote in a paper in 1986 which suggested that there is a notion of fairness that drives the way in which workers accept different wage levels. There is no what is called the reservation wage, which means that a bricklayer, for example, will have a lower wage that is acceptable than a doctor. There is a neutral reference point which affects the way in which workers will accept or not accept employment. In a similar fashion, during a minimum wage hike employees will feel that they are underpaid if they do not gain above the minimum wage when they were working above the minimum wage previous to the