Minimum Wage Jobs Are an Opportunity — Not a Living

Democrats are looking to make another push for an increase in the federal minimum wage as a way to combat their basic failures at all levels of governance the past five years. It’s back to their bread and butter — and in the end, like all their policies, people will lose opportunities and not gain financially.

Raising the cost of labor limits the ability to hire and prevents those with no experience from even gaining a foothold into the job market in the first place. 

If you look at the youth unemployment rates, you wonder how successful a generation can be with only academic experience under its belt for at least 20-plus years without ever working to earn a dollar.

My first job, at the age of 14, was for a local small business in Delaware for minimum wage. Back in the dark ages, minimum wage was pretty minimum. I started working for under $4/hr and to this day I’m grateful that I had that opportunity.  Looking back, it’s clear that even in that first job I ended up gravitating to the same core skill set that has set me apart throughout my career.  While I was hired to be a sales man there were other roles that always needed an assistant — and as I proved valuable and capable of working independently in each one, I continued to receive more responsibilities.

The upside for me was increased responsibility, a challenge, and also wage raises throughout my teen years. The other benefit that I didn’t appreciate at the time — but have to laugh at a bit now after an undergrad and masters degree — that in many ways, I’m doing the same thing for a living that I did in my very first job. I look for places to make a difference in a supply chain or production or development cycle and maximize the ability to get work out the door. Whether it’s the queue of all the Saturday baked goods orders that had specific pick up times, or management of drug development execution that has many of the same elements of time management, prioritization, and oversight. There are more variables, but really in the end, I’m adding value to a business in a very similar way that I as a teen.

My first job gave me a window into what no schooling ever did. School was relatively easy for me, so in many ways I never learned what I wasn’t good at since As came easy. The real world is a shock because there are no tests, no grades; there is just what have you done to provide value. The nice thing was I found that even more rewarding than the tacit approval of a scrawled A across a test.

• What could I bring to the table to differentiate myself in the real world?
• Where did I add value where others did not?
• What did I truly enjoy versus solely execute well but without passion or interest?
• What tasks or interactions did I find challenging?

School by its very nature is a test environment and can’t ever teach you these things. Working does and people who push to eliminate opportunity for working for younger kids are stealing this very experience from young adults. I didn’t think twice about starting work at a young age, nor did my parents consider it a conflict with my ability to excel at school. Further, in many subtle ways, having a job and a paycheck was an implicit reminder that school was a means to an end. I was meant to work and to earn a living — not to regurgitate information in a test format.

Today’s parents, in their efforts to shelter children, may discourage working while in high school despite the evidence that having a job as a teenagers is a self-esteem builder.

In fact, summer employment is more of a deterrent than holding a job during the school year, attending church, participating in sports or living in a two-parent home, according to the research by Rob Baller, associate professor of sociology in the University of Iowa College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, who co-authored the study with Kelly Richardson, a data analyst at the Iowa City VA Medical Center. Summer employment is thought to be beneficial because it creates self-esteem while reducing isolation and substance abuse, and it does not conflict with school work in the way a job during the school year could, Baller said.

Further, holding a job early on may enhance your job prospects.

[H]olding a job may enhance long-term economic success. Notes Elaine Augot, who spent eleven years teaching English as a Second Language to high school students in Massachusetts, “Having a job can be positive if it gives kids a vision of what life is going to be like afterward. If you don’t like what you are doing because you are working in a boring job, then you may decide that education is the way to go.”

A substantial body of research conducted over the last twenty years tends to corroborate this insight. Paid work during high school is generally associated with a greater chance of finding a job after graduation, longer spells of employment, and higher income. Most studies have focused on the first year or two after high school graduation, although a few have documented positive impacts on wages and occupational status that persist up to a decade after graduation.

Unfortunately, now we have a push to yet again raise the minimum wage at the federal level. This will eliminate the ability of many businesses to take a low-cost risk on a person with no job history to see what happens. Further, it doesn’t account for the wide range of the cost of living across the United States. One might ask why we need a federal minimum wage at all and not just leave such matters to each state to determine what works best.

Minimum wage was never meant to be a living wage and, if it is, it means a future where kids are denied the opportunity I was fortunate enough to have as a kid.

As a jobs program, raising the minimum wage is a real loser.  Congress raised the minimum wage 10.6% in July, 2009 (know of anyone else getting a raise then?).  In the ensuring 6 months, nearly 600,000 teen jobs disappeared, even with nearly 4% growth in the economy, this compared to a loss of 250,000 jobs in the first half of the year as GDP growth declined by 4%

The pride of earning and saving your own money — while getting an opportunity to work with people of all ages and experiences — and finding where you fit in, and what your natural strengths are, the types of experiences that result in a larger paycheck in the future.

My job, while just an after school job, allowed me to work in customer service, supply chain management, and even develop some lifelong cake decorating skills that I’m grateful were available when I was a kid. Heck, it even allowed me to meet US Senators like Joe Biden. Well, that’s not actually that big of an f’n deal….

It’s a challenge every one faces, whether you have an advanced degree or not. Once you get that job, where do you go from there? My first job gave me a head start on understanding where I fit in best. It made it easier when I had to narrow options to be confident I was moving the right direction — both career-wise and in job satisfaction, given my track record early on of discovering what made me tick. I also learned early on that you may get one job to get in the door, but there’s always an opportunity to advance based on your own initiative.

Learn to look where you can make a difference in every job you have, it pays off.