President Franklin D. Roosevelt created a minimum wage to ensure that people working would have a decent standard of living, and stated that businesses relying on poverty wages had no right to exist in a civilized country. Minimum wage was never meant to be a starting wage for teenagers, and the majority of people working minimum wage jobs are not, in fact, teenagers. They’re people who work hard and deserve to have the things necessary for survival at the very least.

The Fair Labor Standards Act was put in place in 1938 to aid the country’s recovery from the Great Depression. In 2009, the federal minimum wage was raised to $7.25, and it has not moved since. Individual states have enacted a higher minimum wage, but it’s still often not enough for people to survive on, and some of those individuals have to rely on federal assistance despite working full time. 

It's predatory of these major companies to not pay their employees enough while the people at the top get tax breaks and higher salaries every year. They will keep getting away with it for as long as we keep arguing that these jobs are meant for teenagers, that “no one is actually working for minimum wage anymore,” and that getting a further education will keep people from having to work minimum wage jobs. These things are simply not true.

It's 2026. A federal minimum wage of $7.25 in a country where someone is a trillionaire, is a joke. The economy cannot thrive if the people at the bottom don’t have money to spend, and the larger the wage gap becomes, the more impoverished the people at the bottom will be.

Sign my petition, and help us keep those in charge accountable. Because I don’t want to keep living in a world where people are starving to death, while the rich exploit them for personal gain.