Livable Wage

I remember earlier in the summer when I was talking to my parents and somehow the idea of raising the minimum wage to make every job provide a livable wage came into the topic of discussion. It was an interesting conversation with two very different perspectives. I’m not going to give any details but there were two sides, one who supported the idea and another who was more hesitant, but liked all of the positives of the situation. Unfortunately, the conversation got a little heated.

Today, the minimum wage is $7.25, but most jobs will pay over that. But that doesn’t mean that those jobs pay a liveable wage. If someone were to solely live on a minimum wage, it would take 180 hours of work to make monthly rent for a one bedroom apartment here in raleigh. Based on the standard 40 hour work week, you would have to work 20 extra hours just to make rent. Then you would need to work even more for other expenses, like food and gas.

I found a website (livingwage.mit.edu) which calculated the living wage for one adult, two adults with one working, or two adults with both working, and had a range of 0–3 children for each section. Taking into account the previous example, a liveable wage for one adult with no children would be $18.36 in raleigh. And this is just liveable, it is very likely that nearly every dollar will be going to necessities, and there will be not much money left for anything else.