The social problem that I have chosen to write about is the issue of the livability (or lack thereof) of the minimum wage in the city of Chicago. I think it’s a social problem because the current minimum wage in Chicago, $10/hr (abc7chicago.com) is not nearly enough for people to live off of, and it impacts a gigantic number of people. About 329,000 people in Chicago make under $15 an hour [the proposed minimum wage] (Fortino 1). A social problem also involves people needing a resource that is not readily available to them, and in this instance, it involves people needing money that isn’t there when it’s needed. One of the major effects of living on minimum wage is emotional stress and feelings of anxiety. An article from the February 2,
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According to a recently published article in The Washington Post, ‘…there were still almost 3 million people who made the minimum wage or less in the United States in 2014’ (DePillis 1). Washington state currently has the highest minimum wages in the country, at $9.15/hour (Ncsl 1). Even so, it’s not humanly possible to live on that little money, especially if you have children. MIT has a calculator that allows users to calculate the amount of money that a typical single American parent needs to raise a child. The average minimum wage per hour required to raise a child in the U.S is around $7.75/hour, and some states don’t even pay that much. Of course, the average is higher if you have more than one …show more content…
I would argue that one major reason that the minimum wage is so low in Chicago is that people have preconceived ideas about why people are poor. One of those ideas is that people making minimum wage have made themselves poor, and therefore deserves the suffering that poverty brings. Because people believe that poverty is self-inflicted, they have little (if any) desire to help them. The expression “a person gets what he/she deserves” has pionered this idea. Helping them in this case would mean raising the minimum wage so that workers could have a better quality of life. Another preconceived notion is that poverty just doesn’t exist all that much in the United States today. According to www.socialworkdegree.com, 47 million people rely on foodstamps! If that’s not evidence that poverty doesn’t exist, than I really don’t know what is. Going along with this, I think that many people don’t acknowledge a situation if it doesn’t directly apply to them. For example, the middle and upper class citizens of Chicago don’t really think about poverty and the minimum wage because they don’t have to live it daily. If they did, they would probably think a lot more deeply about the effects of minimum wage, and therefore would possibly raise
According to a recently published article in The Washington Post, ‘…there were still almost 3 million people who made the minimum wage or less in the United States in 2014’ (DePillis 1). Washington state currently has the highest minimum wages in the country, at $9.15/hour (Ncsl 1). Even so, it’s not humanly possible to live on that little money, especially if you have children. MIT has a calculator that allows users to calculate the amount of money that a typical single American parent needs to raise a child. The average minimum wage per hour required to raise a child in the U.S is around $7.75/hour, and some states don’t even pay that much. Of course, the average is higher if you have more than one …show more content…
I would argue that one major reason that the minimum wage is so low in Chicago is that people have preconceived ideas about why people are poor. One of those ideas is that people making minimum wage have made themselves poor, and therefore deserves the suffering that poverty brings. Because people believe that poverty is self-inflicted, they have little (if any) desire to help them. The expression “a person gets what he/she deserves” has pionered this idea. Helping them in this case would mean raising the minimum wage so that workers could have a better quality of life. Another preconceived notion is that poverty just doesn’t exist all that much in the United States today. According to www.socialworkdegree.com, 47 million people rely on foodstamps! If that’s not evidence that poverty doesn’t exist, than I really don’t know what is. Going along with this, I think that many people don’t acknowledge a situation if it doesn’t directly apply to them. For example, the middle and upper class citizens of Chicago don’t really think about poverty and the minimum wage because they don’t have to live it daily. If they did, they would probably think a lot more deeply about the effects of minimum wage, and therefore would possibly raise