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Minimum Wage During Industrialization

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We are arguably living in the aftereffects of a country that reached its heights of Capitalism during the Industrialization era. Prior to the introduction of machinery and rail road systems to America, the economical framework relied on a warped version of lasseiz-faire and featured wealthy descendants of British merchants who joined the colonies. Others worked menial jobs and apprenticeships to guarantee their source of income and it is safe to say that many were unhappy with their predicament --- even if they had no platform to voice this opinion. While the Industrialization Era introduced centuries of wealth to America, it also severely tipped the wealth distribution scale which can be seen extremely in events like the multiple depressions …show more content…
And it will help businesses, too - raising the wage will put more money in people's pockets, which they will pump back into the economy by spending it on goods and services in their communities.” While the technological innovation and scientific revolution has increased, so has the cost of living. This is why minimum wage must go up: because the cost of living has increased. Education is essential to one wishing to work even a minimum wage job, and many people living in the middle-class or poverty level are unable to afford education properly. This exhibits the potential energy of classism bubbling to the surface as economic inequality. Companies should be required to pay workers what they deserve, which is substantially more than what the minimum wage is today. According to a 2015 BLS Report by the United States Government, 35.5 Percent of minimum wage workers are least forty years old and a whopping 56.4% of women.1 Without doubt this opens way to a new piece of evidence to discuss when talking about minimum wage. These companies are vehement to pay the working backbone of their very nature - especially fast-food companies - but have no problem installing self-checkout kiosks in franchises like McDonalds to limit their minimum wage workers. This poses an even more important question than before: if we demand that minimum wage be raised, will …show more content…
It has already begun in the form of multi-billionaire dollar startup companies like Uber, AirBnB and CafeX, which is a startup that employs a robot to serve coffee as opposed to a real human worker doing the tasks for customers. We are seeing a receding line of demand for human workers and a influx of kiosk-based sale systems that not only augment the human’s need for participation in the job, but completely eliminates it as well. These are just some of the examples of the micro and macroeconomics at force with the scale of results for raising the minimum wage. The secondary effects are just as bad. By raising minimum wage, we are making automation of jobs more cost-effective and possibly endangering the very same people we are hoping to protect through these new instances of legislation. It is certainly something to be considered as the Brookings thinking tank considered in their 2015 article “Raising Minimum Wage makes Automation More Cost Effective”. The authors of the article, Jack Karsten and Darrell M. West, said the following regarding automation and minimum wage: “As computers replace humans for some minimum wage jobs, it will force displaced workers to upgrade their skills in order to stay competitive. Knowing how to manipulate computers in a work environment will become an increasingly

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