New York Must Increase the Minimum Wage Essay -- Minimum Wage Essays

Living in Bushwick commuting to school four days a week to Coney Island, and going to work four days a week at Rite Aid in Sunnyside, Queens, is more overwhelming than what it sounds. Working overnight from Monday to Friday, earning minimum wage and being taxed on top of that isn’t enough due to prices of gas, food, and necessities sky-rocketing. The job pays $7.25 per hour but I make a $0.75 differential for working the night shift. It’s difficult to be a student and work when you only have yourself as a form of financial support. There are days I don’t sleep and hours before I get a meal, because I get trapped by my living expenses, its long before I am able to splurge on luxuries and wants. Nevertheless, it has become challenging to keep my GPA up and my academic performance to its capability, but there isn’t an alternative. Before the late 1930’s, there was not a federal minimum wage. Minimum wage is the least amount an employer can pay to their employees. The current federal minimum wage is $7.25. In the early 1900’s, during industrialization, employees worked for little up to no money. The working conditions during this era weren’t regulated and there weren’t any labor laws that instated the ethics of working conditions. In New York City, there were just over 500 sweatshop garment factories in where the working conditions were very hazardous and in one case, deadly. On March 25, 1911, 146 garment workers died in a fire. The victims were mostly young immigrant women but among them were also immigrant men and children too. These women and men across New York City had had a protest in 1910 in where they demanded unionized workplaces. Unions helped these workers protect their rights. They deserved the right to have respectab... ... double digit wage and not some dollars and a few cents an hour. Fixing the way financial aid is distributed, the money available, and the cost of college education would be a solution due to the criterion to qualify for full financial aid coverage is ridiculous. I'd first want to start with making public school something more year round. This would eliminate teaching as a "seasonal" job. Requiring more hours in school, less holidays and by focusing on the â€Å"No Child Left Behind† policy, it would benefit students to learn what’s necessary including circumstances where they’d face the real world. It is crucial and necessary in building a better New York so that our fellow New Yorkers do become our future. Pushing them into to succeeding in essential subjects like math and science, it would prepare the future of America for college and not discourage them from career.