38 Million Have Quit Their Jobs

by Aaron Macke

Workers in many different industries have resorted to quitting their jobs with 38,000,000 last year alone to try and get minimum wage raised. It has grown to the point where around 3% of all people with jobs have quit and are causing serious work droughts in many industries. Some Industries are hit harder than others though, most people quitting are in retail, healthcare, or the food industry, These workers tend to quit the most because they are

either the ones suffering from the low minimum wage or they are the ones being overworked ever since the pandemic started. Most Americans support that minimum wage should be raised to $15, “Minimum wage should be however it much it takes to survive in that area, and it should increase yearly with inflation. Every year that the minimum wage stays the same it’s actual value gets smaller and smaller” said Jason Tanner, PSHS student.

There are a lot of different numbers being thrown around on what minimum wage should actually be but $15 seems to be the general realistic goal for minimum wage to become “live-able”. Many people believe that this so called “Mass Resignation” is new but it only really started to grow when Covid came around and many people lost their jobs and Healthcare workers became overworked and underpaid for putting themselves in harms way, after many

people survived their financial hardship with Covid it became easier for them to go ahead with resigning and trying to raise minimum wage, it also showed people how valuable their own time really is and how needed they are. Many people are against people quitting because they think that the workers are just being lazy and using minimum wage as an excuse but in reality they’re striving for people who work minimum wage jobs to actually be able to

support themselves and not rely on other people or social programs.

People getting payed minimum wage can’t afford to support themselves without help, people being payed the current federal minimum wage would have to work 80 hours per week, every week to make just barely over $29,000 year which in a lot of city’s rent can easily be over $1000 a month for a small apartment. In addition to raising minimum wage many people believe we should also rearrange how much people get taxed every year, many people would argue that there is no reason that minimum wage workers should have taxes taken out of their already limited income when many very wealthy people have to pay next to nothing in taxes every year.

People also believe that this is one of the first times that people have willingly created such a job shortage, which they are partly correct but there has been strikes all through history just none have really been as big or long lasting as this. We can already see that these work shortages have caused improvement to happen like in Arkansas where minimum wage has risen from $10 to $11 per hour and in Oregon where it has moved from $12 to $12.75

per hour, so even though things aren’t radically changing ,they are slowly making their way up and hopefully they will eventually raise to a “live-able” minimum wage.