The Debate Over The Minimum Wage Debate - 1737 Words

Andrew Carnegie once said â€Å"Do your duty and a little more and the future will take care of itself.† Carnegie: for better or worse, played an important part in the worker’s rights movement. Some of the very first movements for workers to unionize and protect their jobs came during Carnegie’s time and would mark the very beginning of long and difficult process to achieve worker’s rights that still continue to this day. The minimum wage debate is without a doubt part of these negotiations and has taken the spotlight in recent years. There are two sides to the minimum wage debate: the employees fighting for higher wages who would like to earn enough to keep food on the table for their family, and the employer who is doing what they can to keep†¦show more content†¦These sweatshops employed women and children and paid them far less than a reasonable wage. The minimum wage was created to â€Å"help individuals or families achieve self-sufficiency, and, as a result, coverage of minimum wage laws was extended to men and to workers in most low-paid occupations,† (Neumark Wascher, 2008). Throughout history minimum wage laws have been thought of as the right thing to do, but it is still uncertain if it is the correct way to achieve goals. Although the minimum wage debate had been going on for some time the very first federal wage law was passed in 1938 by Congress as part of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Moving forward, the next big event in the history of the minimum wage debate occurred in 1981 with the Minimum Wage Study Commission. This covered what was thought to be everything we as a country needed to know about minimum wage. Although some believed that there was still more to be known and in the mid-1990s, where it was found that â€Å"Minimum wages play an important role in youth labor markets†¦[and] the principal intent of the minimum wage [is] helping raise incomes of low-income families,† (Neumark W ascher, 2008). For the most part, that is still where the debate lingers today, whether raising the minimum wage is the correct way of helping people live on reasonable salaries and what that means for young people working low-income jobs. Many people that are against raising the minimum