Imagen you have a job where you work long eight hour shifts, five days a week. After that long week of working around 40 hours, you notice you’re finding it harder and harder to make ends meet. This forces you to live paycheck to paycheck, often having to raise kids, needing to clothes them and feed them as well as yourself. Needing to pay car bills, gas, rent, groceries, and other living necessities off the minimum wage salary can become tiring, needing to work extra hours to pay the essentials. Barley getting by, people give up time with their kids to work and give …show more content…
In the article “Real Family Values: Raising the Federal Minimum wage” by Jack Jenkins focuses on a family of three and the struggles of having to live off the minimum wage pay. In this article it states that “millions of minimum wage families cannot afford to wait any longer …we owe them a chance to live a life in which stability, self-sufficiency and quality family time are norm, not the exception.”(Jenkins).This piece of evidence shows that it’s not only one or two families going through this struggles but millions all across the United states. They cannot afford to live how they live for much longer. This means they need higher pay to live a life, as he said, a life of stability, self-sufficiency and where quality family time is a normal thing. The story of a single father of two daughters, whose family time is cut short due to work obligations, is told in this article. Working as a full time server at a restaurant often working 30 plus hours a week, sometimes extra hours. The father is Aaron Foster whose pay “amount around $13,000 per year, well below the federal poverty threshold of $19,530 for a family of three. It is barely enough for him to feed himself let alone 2 daughters.”(Jenkins). This proves the minimum wage is not enough to raise families so it causes parents to work extra hours and that causes more time away from home meaning less time with their children. Others may say raising the minimum wage one or two dollars won’t help them escape poverty, so why raise it. In this article it says the Fosters earnings are well below the federal poverty threshold for a family of three “.(Jenkins).Although this might be true , one or two dollars more an hour will not make them escape poverty, but after working several hours a week , the amount will add up and this will make a difference in the lives of so many other families in