Increase In Minimum Wage

Wage and Hour Division
May 25th 2007 President Bush signed an act called the FSLA. The act, FSLA, will raise minimum wages in three steps. On July 24th 2007 minimum wages went up to $5.85 an hour. The next scheduled raise in minimum wage is on July 24th 2008, which will raise minimum wages up to $6.55 an hour. The last raise will be effective on July 24th 2009 and will increase the minimum wages to $7.25.
These raises will affect a lot of college students whether they get paid minimum wage or not. With everything comes cause and effect. When the minimum wage steps are injected into society they will put pressure on a lot of business. Not only small business will be affected but large ones also. With the raise any business has to make choices, to fire employees or to raise the prices in order to make up for the losses they suffer on minimum wage increase. I work with selling and pricing goods for minimum wage and ever since I received my mandatory raise I have witnessed increases in most all of our products and we had to fire two of our employees. Those students who get more then minimum wage will be stuck paying more and thus taking away from their future.
I think the better route would have been to raise wages only after the prices of goods started to increase.