By Heidy Ornelas

Last week while browsing the Internet, I ran into many photos of protesters wishing to raise minimum wage from $7 to $15.

Immediately I was intrigued and kept going through those pictures, and in between photos I found one uploaded by an employee working at a fast food restaurant. He must have been oblivious to the protest pictures because it showed a picture of an Imperial Star Wars AT-AT walker built out of ketchup tubs. Subtitle of the photo said “bored at work.” This picture shows the reality of the big picture. How employees at fast food restaurants are not in fact being prolific. Instead, work efficiency is in a state of decline because people are being facile.

Some would argue that work efficiency would increase if minimum wage would be increased, but in reality a mindless job of the sort does not promote people’s capacity for self-improvement. Higher pay does not signify better work quality either, and, in most cases, it would most likely promote laziness.

For many American workers, minimum wage is just a teenage condition, before moving into  financially rewarding work. Nevertheless, someone who has decided to not graduate high school with a diploma or go to college should find a job that profits them for their hard work if they are getting little pay.

If people cannot do anything about having a good job with good pay, now days you can get certified for almost anything, but there are steps into getting certified like having a clean record or clean license and also being able to pass the certain certification test which requires a lot of work and effort. For example, our school’s head custodian Paul Seymour was very smart-enough to have gotten certified. He did start as a sub custodian when looking for a job after working in construction. He says that after being stable at his job as sub custodian for four years and getting his certifications, the job for building engineering came up and he works today, glad to have found this job.

Recent debate has heated up about whether the government should raise the minimum wage, increasing both the earnings of the lowest-level employees and the costs for employers. Increasing the minimum wage has not proven to be effective at lowering the poverty rate, so it looks like the minimum wage will probably be staying right where it is for some time to come.