Savannah Brady

5th Period

POLS 1100

March 28, 2020

My Group partners: Nicole Parkin and Brianne Sandberg

Minimum Wage And Poverty

Overview:

My group decided to go with minimum wage and how that leads to poverty. Most

importantly is if parents who don’t have a college degree will have trouble being able to support

their families. In the United States there are about 79.9 million workers that represent 58.7% of

all wage and salary workers, as of 2016 (Characteristics of minimum wage workers, 2017).

Among the 79.9 million workers, 701,000 earn the minimum wage (Characteristics of minimum

wage workers, 2017). In 2018, 38.1 million people were in poverty (US Census Bureau, 2019).

Poverty rates for children (18 and below) in 2017 and 2018 decreased from 17.4% to 16.2% (US

Census Bureau, 2019). These all are a big percentage considering the small group that they

represent. Even with minimum wage there still were 38.1 million people that were in poverty.

But it is a good thing that America secures a safety net for these scenarios for most people.

According to Does increasing the minimum wage reduce poverty in developing

Countries, “If low-income workers lose jobs and cannot find new ones because of higher

minimum wages and there are no social safety nets, higher minimum wages will increase
poverty.” This is one reason my group decided to do this topic. Granted here in the United States,

we have safety nets like social security and food stamps, but sometimes those still aren’t enough

to help people. There are some people who either don’t fit into the category of being able to get

social security or food stamps. Not only is it difficult for these people to stay afloat if they lose

their job, then it would be ten times harder for them to get a job because of little experience.

Hypothesis:

Our hypothesis is that for those parents that don’t have a college degree, won’t be able to

support their families. What we also wanted to do for our experiment was see if poverty would

have to do with people in the family not having a job and if the parents have a college degree.

What we thought, is that this would be common between people who have minimum wage jobs

and how this could have an effect with falling into poverty.

Methodology:

We decided to do a poll on two different platforms of social media. The first one was

Twitter and the next one was Instagram. We asked about eleven questions to help us figure out if

our hypothesis was right. The questions that we asked were how many people are in your

family? Do your parents have a college degree? Do your parents make more than minimum

wage? Do you help your parents financially? Where do you live? Would you say you live

comfortably? What is your housing situation (apartment, house, condo, etc). Do you need

government assistants? Do you worry about making ends meat? And do both your parents work?

We decided to choose these questions because we thought these questions would help decide if
people were going to be led into poverty because of the stigma around having to have a college

degree.

Results:

Each person in my group posted an anonymous poll on social media. Our first platform

that we used was Twitter. Some of the results from the poll were that 50 people surveyed total.

There were 72% of people whose parents have a degree, 28% do not. Of the parents that do have

a degree, 100% make above minimum wage. There's only 19.4% of people that have to help

financially. There's 100% people that live comfortably and 0% need assistance from the

government. Of the people whose parents don't have a degree, 85% make above minimum wage.

50% of people have to help financially. 71% live comfortably, and 42% need help from the

government.

We redid the poll on a different platform and got different results. This platform was

Instagram. These results were that 18 people surveyed. 88% said that their parents have a college

degree, while 12% said their parents do not. For the parents that do have a college degree, 75%

say that they live comfortably. While 25% said that they don't. 31% of people said that they help

their parents financially, while 69% said that they don't. 94% of people said that their family

does not get support from the government, while 6% do get support.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, we found that most families are able to live comfortably. Only so many

people have to support their families. That only a handful have to get help from the government.
Either way the research that I have looked at, shows that it is very difficult to live entirely off of

minimum wage. For people who want to conduct this experiment again, get more people to

participate in the experiment. That way the data is more diverse in the findings. If you are doing

this experiment in groups, make sure that you are talking to your group members a lot more than

what you probably should. That way everyone is staying up to date on what everyone should be

doing. Even come up with some more questions that could help figure out the hypothesis a little

better.
 Resources:

Characteristics of minimum wage workers, 2016 : BLS Reports. (2017, April 1). Retrieved

March 20, 2020, from https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2016/home.htm

US Census Bureau. (2019, September 17). Income and Poverty in the United States: 2018.

Retrieved March 20, 2020, from

https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2019/demo/p60-266.html

H., T. (2018, November 21). Does increasing the minimum wage reduce poverty in developing

countries? Retrieved March 20, 2020, from

https://wol.iza.org/articles/does-increasing-the-minimum-wage-reduce-poverty-in-develo

ping-countries/long