The fifteen dollar minimum wage seems great. People get more money, and therefore a higher standard of life. Right? Well, here is the dirty truth.

A fifteen dollar minimum wage is a simple concept. A lot of people do work consisting of unskilled labor. They don’t need education to do the job, they don’t need strength; it’s a job that everyone can do. As a result, there’s a lot of people who can do labor jobs, without many of these available. Obviously with supply and demand, these jobs will be paid with quite a low wage.

But on the other hand, they can’t be paid too little or else they, the working class, will have horrendous standards of life. The government wants to ensure that people aren’t using “slave labor” and they also want to make sure people are getting paid a fair amount.

Recently, there have been talks about raising the minimum wage to fifteen dollars an hour. But that money isn’t coming from thin air. It’s not good news for the employer, but the employee as well. Here’s why.

Reason #1: Higher Wages Creates A Higher Workload

Let’s say I owned a coffee shop, for the sake of explanation.

I paid my employees $10 per hour. Now, the minimum wage rises to $15 per hour, so I am obligated to pay my employees fifty percent more of what they were earning before. I can’t afford this.

My coffee shop has tiny profit margins, and even if I sell a thousand cups of coffee at a dollar each, I will only earn a thousand dollars. Now, if my employees work ten hours at $15 per hour, three hundred dollars of my gross profit is already used on labour. Then subtract rent fees, utility, maintenance, equipment, coffee costs, and I’m probably losing money.

Now if I decide to lay off one employee, I could choose to let one employee run the cashier and coffee machines, but now they have two employees worth of work. But my employee is only getting paid fifty percent more, so he is actually losing out. He does more work, for less money actually. And there is also one less job available in the world.

Imagine this, but on a large-scale. That’s what will happen if minimum wage rises to fifteen dollars an hour. No one wins.

Reason #2: Employees should have freedom of choosing their pay.

Going back to my coffee shop example, imagine what happens to the person I lay off. Obviously, they don’t have a job anymore. Now, in comparison, his ten dollars an hour job is way better than having no job at all.

People should have the freedom of choosing if they want to work at a low wage or not. If minimum wage rises, there will be fewer jobs available. You get higher workload jobs with better pay if you raise minimum wage, but at the expense of many losing decent jobs. Instead of people having an okay job, people are either working more or unemployed.

If you ask me, I’d have to go with the first option. The employees should choose if they want to work for ten dollars an hour, not the government.

Reason #3: Minimum Wage Is Not The Living Wage

An argument for raising minimum wage is that people won’t be able to live well on ten dollars an hour. Although this is true, I don’t think it is relevent in this argument.

People in developing countries are earning two dollars an hour and are perfectly happy with their pay. A person working fifty dollars an hour still might not be happy with their pay. Why is this? I say that human beings adapt extremely well, to a pay raise or a pay cut.

Rich higher class people may think that having a 48 inch flat screen television is a necessity. They may also think that an iPad is a necessity. But to the lower class, these things are luxuries.

People can adapt to lower pay, and they can also adapt to a higher pay. If you raise the wage, people will suddenly think some things are needed, while it may not have been before. My point is that human beings will never have “too much money.” The rich man will complain about having too little money because they cannot afford a million dollar mansion. The poor man will complain about having too little money because they cannot afford food.

The minimum wage does not have to be enough to live off of. People can choose that for themselves.

Conclusion

With all this said, I think you can see why the minimum wage does not have to be raised. Or at least consider my viewpoint. The minimum wage is not beneficial to anyone in my opinion, whether you’re the employer or the employee. It has adverse effects, and governments need to consider that minimum wage does not mean free money for all.