For class this week, I and my classmates were asked to investigate how much money a single parent of two children would need to survive in a month, and to compare this budget to their income if they were working full time at a minimum wage job. While I was not surprised to find that a basic estimate exceeded this income, I was shocked by how much higher even conservative estimates on the sources I found were. Before I began to renegotiate what I felt the family could do without, the budget I planned exceeded the income by over $700.
Even worse, I found that there were costs I had note even considered, or others I had assumed would not exist. While I, and my classmates, were eventually able to develop a plan to survive on minimum wage, for each of us, success depended on support from organizations or theorized friends and family which in actuality could not be counted on. My answer for far too many necessities was “I will get that free from [insert organization here]”, but in real life the level of support from nonprofits and other agencies cannot be guaranteed. Personally, I find the fact that an individual could not survive on a minimum wage budget without a great deal of luck and sacrificing of what the more fortunate would consider necessities to be unfair. While I acknowledge that there are some legitimate concerns about raising minimum wage, the entire point of its existence is to ensure that everyone who works can survive, and at this point, I believe that the experiment we conducted proves that the current minimum wage does not meet that standard.