According to Raise the Minimum Wage, “In no state can a minimum wage worker afford

a two-bedroom unit at Fair Market Rent, working a standard 40-hour work week.” All minimum

wage workers cannot afford to live in a standard living space, much less when supporting other

people. The living wage is much higher than the minimum wage. In the book Nickel and Dimed,

the author Barbara Ehrenreich does an experiment to see if a person could live on minimum

wage. She concludes that minimum wage is not able to support a person. That argument is still as

relevant today as in 2001.

In the first place, Barbara stated in the Evaluation, which is after she had done her

experiment, that the minimum wage was not able to support a person. In the evaluation, she

mostly used logos to convince the reader that in her experience, minimum wage was just not

enough. She expresses that, “You would come across news of a study showing that the

percentage of Wisconsin food-stamp families in ‘extreme poverty’ – defined as less than 50

percent of the federal poverty line – has tripled in the last decade to more than 30 percent”

(Ehrenreich 219). This shows that in 1999, there was a growing number of people have a harder

time surviving and have to go to the government for help. Barbara uses facts to show that

minimum wage is clearly not able to support a person or their families. Overall, the living wage

situation in 1999 was not going well.

Even now, people cannot live on the low wage that they get. In a report from CNN by

Richard Trumka and Christine Owens in 2013, they asked how a person could pay her rent on

the low wages. She replied, “I’m kind of on my last little leg, because I’ve been late on rent. I’m

actually behind on three months in rent.” When Barbara did her experiment, she could not pay

her next