Minimum Wage

Final Paper 1

18 June 2017         

        Minimum wage is defined as the lowest amount of revenue that an employer can legally pay their workers for an hour of labor. The documentary viewed called, 30 Days: Minimum Wage, shows a couple, Morgan and Alex who take on jobs as minimum wage workers in the city of Columbus, OH. This displayed the constant struggles of an American minimum wage worker trying to live day-to-day and survive off of a limited budget, which is so limited that it takes a large toll on these workers to survive. There has become a heated debate across the United States of whether or not minimum wage increases the standard of living and reduces poverty, or if it increases unemployment and troubles the unskilled workforce. In the book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Dan Pink suggests that America has “too much compliance and too little engagement in the workplace” and that the nation needs a new “operating system” for the workplace.^[1]  The concept of engagement and meaningful work cannot exist within a workplace, where the labor force receives minimum wage, due to the ties between algorithmic work and heuristic work, in which algorithmic work provides a routine and directly contradicts to the abstract style of work within heuristic.

The question here is whether or not minimum wage work can be engaging or meaningful. From the documentary, 30 days: Minimum Wage, we saw many times where while working a minimum wage job the people faced a lot of difficulties. We saw that Morgan and his wife started off with a very limited budget, they could not spend more than $400 a month. Morgan found a job with a temp agency where he was doing a lot of yard work and construction which was mostly hard labor. Alex found a job at a coffee shop where she would bus tables and wash dishes. They were both barely making minimum wage and couldn’t even afford to eat, Morgan stated, “There were so many times during the day when I was hungry, but didn’t have the money to spend on food.” They also struggled with finding an apartment that was cheap but also livable, obtaining furniture, transportation to and from work, all these things are factors that people struggle with when working a minimum wage job.^[2] The times where they took the largest financial hit was when Morgan and his wife ended up in the hospital and had to pay for prescriptions and hospital bills. It was almost impossible for them to be able to pay off those bills with the small income that they were making. It is the price people have to pay for only working off of minimum wage, most times they do not get any benefits and they have to pay for their healthcare completely out of pocket. I see these struggles and think how could anyone be happy with only making minimum wage?

When looking at this and the facts presented, you see how much people struggle when trying to live off of minimum wage. If Morgan and his wife had kids, they would be spending “up to $10,000 a year for one child…and if you’re working a minimum wage job, that could be a whole year’s salary.” I also learned that “families who make less than $25,000 a year are twice as likely to divorce than families who make more than $50,000 a year,” that means that most families where both parents are living off of minimum wage do not usually have a stable relationship, especially if money is tight. ^[3]This also translates to the fact that single mothers have the hardest time living off of minimum wage and their kids end up suffering as a result or they end up in bad places with bad people. From this documentary alone I am able to conclude that minimum wage work cannot be engaging or meaningful. Not once in the documentary did I see Morgan and his wife enjoying themselves, without having to deal with money problems. If working a minimum wage job as your only source of income is as bad as it looks, it cannot present any meaningfulness for anyone.

In Dan Pink’s book, he talks about algorithmic work and heuristic work with regards to motivation. With algorithmic work, it is like doing a routine task where someone is telling you exactly what to do and you are simply following directions. It is relatively simple work such as repeating the same thing over and over again, something that does not require much skill or thinking. On the other hand, heuristic work is work where there is no clear predetermined path you have to follow. The solution to the problem that you are working on has not been discovered yet, therefore there is no instructions on how to get there. Heuristic work has become more and more important because it is exiting, challenging, and rewarding.