In the LA Times yesterday, I read a news article on how California is working towards approving the minimum wage increase to $15.00. For us in this class, this seems like great news considering we know that no one can survive just on the current minimum wage anymore. However, for business owners all over California this is serving as a huge problem. Moving the wage from $10.50 to $15.00 means that their prices need to go up and staff needs to be cut in order to continue paying staff members of their restaurants and businesses. This has been a repetitive cycle for many business owners who just cannot afford to pay their workers higher than they already are unless they have a higher demand for their business and raise their prices. But, the problem I see in this article is not what happens to those who lose their jobs from the wage increase, it is the fact that these owners have people already making $15.00 an hour and cannot afford to pay them even more. It is the lower class competing for higher wages and the same issues we have been seeing time and time again.

When you increase the minimum wage it gives better opportunity for those in the lower class to actually live in decent low-cost apartments, if they can find them, but this is temporary. It is temporary because when you increase wages, prices and demand increases almost in every other aspect of the economy too. If people are getting paid more, housing prices and food prices increase too making it essentially impossible for those in the lower class to make a proper lifestyle for themselves still! Not only are prices going to increase but, staff will be cut in many businesses and the hours of those who don’t get cut may decrease. If you cannot afford to lose your job, or in the case of many in this article, both of your jobs, this wage increase is cause for panic.

If the wage increase occurs and these businesses do make their cuts to employees, it will decrease the job opportunities even more. Hopefully the wage increase will not bring this much negative change with it as the people in this article are suspecting, but I guess we will find out.

http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-me-ln-minimum-wage-hikes-and-businesses-to-re-engineer-labor-force-some-say-20160327-story.html