A staple experience in every teenager’s life is getting their first job. The summer going into my junior year was spent daily on a pool deck, carefully surveying the water in hopes of preventing medical emergencies. The hours felt long, the days were certainly hot, and the time spent away from entertainment and company quickly added up, however, there was also a sense of pride and accomplishment in what I was doing. It wasn’t until my first paycheck that reality hit me; my skills and expertise earned the minimum wage. Yet even more shocking for me was considering the millions of people who lived on the minimum wage, barely scraping by and often falling into poverty. While an understandable response is to consider raising the minimum wage to support these people, a further look into the effects of the minimum wage shows that it harms societal well-being. 

When I lifeguarded over the summer, I worked with 5 other teenagers to keep the pool safe. Most of us were cut from the same cloth; we grew up swimming during the summers, we all lived with our parents, and we all just wanted to make some cash part-time during the summer. While we all would’ve loved to have a raise, none of us relied upon our salaries for our standard of living. This raises an important question regarding minimum wage, how many people are realistically affected by it? An article written by Ben Harris addressed the possible “Ripple Effect” of raising the national minimum wage. He calculated that over 35 million workers, roughly 30% of the total workforce, would be compensated. Harris’ data is important because it considers the low-wage workers whose salaries would increase to stay competitive with the minimum wage. As incredible as these benefits seem, they hint towards a larger problem of raising the minimum wage, inflation. Increasing compensation for workers will certainly cause higher operating costs for companies. The cost of higher employment is reflected in the prices companies charge for their goods and services. Given enough time, inflation will reduce the quality of living in correspondence with an increase in minimum wage. This is detrimental to society because it erodes the purchasing power of the dollar, and in short, raises the price of living for everyone. In the long run, as a higher minimum wage increases the money people have, inflation decreases how much they buy. In the words of J.B. Maverick,  the inflation caused by minimum wage “could essentially negate any advantage gained by workers having more dollars in their pockets.” 

For a low-paying job, lifeguarding certainly had some perks. I only had to work 4 hours a day, I got access to all the pool facilities, and the job came with an essentially free gym membership. This context around lifeguarding shows why it was a good first job for me; it equipped me with resources to improve and work around my intense sports schedule. Although lifeguarding is a great stepping stone into the professional world, it hardly constitutes a long-term job. Some people would strongly disagree, saying that we should enable those working minimum wage to stay in those jobs if it works for their lives and schedules. They would even go a step further to say that we can create job opportunities by increasing the minimum wage. As much as I would like this opinion to be true, the statistics show otherwise. A study conducted by Harvard Business Review found that raising the minimum wage would cause more workers to work for less time, degrading overall compensation. This arguably proves both sides of the argument to be correct. Raising the minimum wage does increase job opportunities, the caveat being that each worker works fewer hours. This means that more job opportunities would degrade each worker’s compensation. Another factor to consider is that because people would be working less hours, they may no longer be eligible for benefits. Benefits are generally accumulated by working a certain quantity of hours, therefore hiring more people negates the ability of those workers to earn benefits. Harvard Business Review’s study found that when raising the minimum wage the “average store in our California data set recouped approximately 27.5% of the increase in its wage costs through savings associated with reducing benefits.” This data reflects the biggest problem with attempting to raise the minimum wage. The reality is that companies will find ways to compensate, often by degrading the quality of work or the services provided. For minimum-wage families, this means financial instability, all to give more people access to the same, impoverished lifestyle. 

A minimum wage is not the solution to our economic landscape. Contrary to popular belief, raising the minimum wage will not increase the living standards for those working low-paying jobs. Minimum wage could potentially skyrocket inflation and degrade the quality of life for those earning it. Instead, as Americans, we need to find ways to improve the quality of the candidate rather than the quality of the job. When we can put highly educated, better prepared, and more successful candidates forward, companies will be more willing to pay for the value they receive. Minimum wage undermines this principle and naively assumes that people will rise to the quality of their pay, rather than having their pay rise to the quality of their work. This makes raising the minimum wage detrimental to society, and especially harmful to those who earn it.