LibGuides: Minimum Wage Pros & Cons: The Pros & Cons

The Issues

These resources have both pro and con aspects as well as great overview information.

Con Articles

These articles are against an increase in minimum wage or sometimes against any minimum wage.

Pro Articles

These articles favor an increase in minimum wage.

Pro Books & eBooks

These books favor an increase in minimum wage.

The Economics of Human Rights : Using the Living Income/Fair Price Approach to Combat Poverty This book provides new insights into combining economic theory and ethics, and how to formulate policies to combat the roots of poverty. Since a large part of the world's working population is underpaid, and does not have enough income to feed themselves and their families, there is a need for an alternative approach to producer prices than the usual neo-classical approach with its emphasis on market and equilibrium prices. This book is an introduction to the Living Income / Fair Price approach, a price theory based on ethics and Universal Human Rights. The book explains why there is a need for a paradigm change in our thinking about prices by explaining why the usual market prices rarely are equilibrium prices. Besides market disturbing elements like monopolies and oligopolies, the needs of the poorest parts of the population are not taken into consideration because they are not reflected in the effective demand. This means that the way our producers are paid needs a drastic overhaul, especially in a critical area like food production. An important part of the book is devoted to the need to pay, and the possibilities for paying, a decent price to smallholder farmers. The underpayment of small food producers means they have no possibility to invest and are not able to prepare for the future. This is even more pressing now that climate change demands that every farmer must adjust to changing circumstances and adapt new production methods. Although primarily meant for economists, the book meant also to stimulate discussion amongst those involved in agricultural policies, both in developing and developed countries.
The fight for fifteen : the right wage for a working America "Rolf shows that raising the minimum wage to $15 is both just and necessary, lest the American dream of middle class prosperity turn into a nightmare" (David Cay Johnston, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist).   Combining history, economics, and commonsense political wisdom, The Fight for $15 makes a deeply informed case for a national fifteen-dollars-an-hour minimum wage as the only practical solution to reversing America's decades-long slide toward becoming a low-wage nation.   Drawing both on new scholarship and on his extensive practical experiences organizing workers and grappling with inequality across the United States, David Rolf, president of SEIU 775--which waged the successful Seattle campaign for a fifteen dollar minimum wage--offers an accessible explanation of "middle out" economics, an emerging popular economic theory that suggests that the origins of prosperity in capitalist economies lie with workers and consumers, not investors and employers.   A blueprint for a different and hopeful American future, The Fight for $15 offers concrete tools, ideas, and inspiration for anyone interested in real change in our lifetimes.   "The author's plainspoken approach and stellar scholarship illuminate in-depth discussions about the deliberate policy decisions that began to decimate the middle class at the start of the 1980s as well as the insidious new ways in which big business continues to attack American workers today via stagnant wages, rampant subcontracting, unpredictable scheduling, and other detrimental practices associated with the so-called 'share economy.'" --Kirkus Reviews   "David Rolf has become the most successful advocate for raising wages in the twenty-first century." --Andy Stern, senior fellow at Columbia University's Richard Paul Richman Center for Business, Law, and Public Policy
It's the Economy, Stupid Since the end of World War II, most people around the world regarded the United States as the land of opportunity. The baby boomers and Generation X knew it best as "the land of milk and honey." It was a place where people could easily raise a family and with hard work could achieve anything they set their mind to. The American Dream, a dream of a land where life is better, richer and fuller for everyone, was alive. Much has changed, though, in the past four decades. Most Americans today do not realize that since the early 1990s, when the world markets began to merge and globalization took place, America went through a significant transformation. Today, the America of yesterday, a place where children grew up to ultimately earn more than their parents, is no longer reality but, in most cases, just wishful thinking. In today's globalized world, working in America no longer feels any different than earning a living in Europe or Japan. Indeed, income levels and employment opportunities now appear to be similar. Are they, though? Do Americans still have the edge or has the American Dream finally slipped away? Is it possible to conceive that American workers could be disadvantaged when compared to those living and working in other countries? While most people live their everyday lives never knowing, one thing is clear. Recently, political catchphrases such as "Make America Great Again," deeply resonated with frustrated Americans on both sides of the political divide, more so than election pollsters and the media anticipated during the 2016 presidential election. Undoubtedly, anxiety about the future is in the air, but what causes it? Can the past be restored? One thing is certain. Americans cannot afford to remain complacent with the status quo.
One Fair Wage : Ending Subminimum Pay in America From the author of the acclaimed Behind the Kitchen Door, a powerful examination of how the subminimum wage and the tipping system exploit society’s most vulnerable Before the COVID-19 pandemic devastated the country, more than six million people earned their living as tipped workers in the service industry. They served us in cafes and restaurants, they delivered food to our homes, they drove us wherever we wanted to go, and they worked in nail salons for as little as $2.13 an hour—the federal tipped minimum wage since 1991—leaving them with next to nothing to get by. These workers, unsurprisingly, were among the most vulnerable workers during the pandemic. As businesses across the country closed down or drastically scaled back their services, hundreds of thousands lost their jobs. As in many other areas, the pandemic exposed the inadequacies of the nation’s social safety net and minimum-wage standards. One of New York magazine’s “Influentials” of New York City, one of CNN’s Visionary Women in 2014, and a White House Champion of Change in 2014, Saru Jayaraman is a nationally acclaimed restaurant activist and the author of the bestselling Behind the Kitchen Door. In her new book, One Fair Wage, Jayaraman shines a light on these workers, illustrating how the people left out of the fight for a fair minimum wage are society’s most marginalized: people of color, many of them immigrants; women, who form the majority of tipped workers; disabled workers; incarcerated workers; and youth workers. They epitomize the direction of our whole economy, reflecting the precariousness and instability that is increasingly the lot of American labor.
On the Clock: what low-wage work did to me and how it drives America insane "Nickel and Dimed for the Amazon age," (Salon) the bitingly funny, eye-opening story of finding work in the automated and time-starved world of hourly low-wage labor After the local newspaper where she worked as a reporter closed, Emily Guendelsberger took a pre-Christmas job at an Amazon fulfillment center outside Louisville, Kentucky. There, the vending machines were stocked with painkillers, and the staff turnover was dizzying. In the new year, she travelled to North Carolina to work at a call center, a place where even bathroom breaks were timed to the second. And finally, Guendelsberger was hired at a San Francisco McDonald's, narrowly escaping revenge-seeking customers who pelted her with condiments. Across three jobs, and in three different parts of the country, Guendelsberger directly took part in the revolution changing the U.S. workplace. Offering an up-close portrait of America's actual "essential workers," On the Clock examines the broken social safety net as well as an economy that has purposely had all the slack drained out and converted to profit. Until robots pack boxes, resolve billing issues, and make fast food, human beings supervised by AI will continue to get the job done. Guendelsberger shows us how workers went from being the most expensive element of production to the cheapest - and how low wage jobs have been remade to serve the ideals of efficiency, at the cost of humanity. On the Clock explores the lengths that half of Americans will go to in order to make a living, offering not only a better understanding of the modern workplace, but also surprising solutions to make work more humane for millions of Americans.
Restoring the Middle Class Through Wage Policy This book delivers a fresh and fascinating perspective on the issue of the minimum wage. While most discussions of the minimum wage place it at the center of a debate between those who oppose such a policy and argue it leads to greater unemployment, and those who favor it and argue it improves the economic well-being of low-income workers, Levin-Waldman makes the case for the minimum wage as a way to improve the well-being of middle-income workers, strengthen the US economy, reduce income inequality, and enhance democracy. Making a timely and original contribution to the defining issues of our time--the state of the middle class, the problem of inequality, and the crisis of democratic governance--Restoring the Middle Class through Wage Policy will be of interest to students and researchers considering the impact of such approaches across the fields of public policy, economics, and political science.