Letter To The Editor: FIU Students Should Fight For Higher Minimum Wage

Joshua Lane/Guest Columnist

Gabriela Enamorado’s opinion piece about the need to raise Florida’s minimum and the cost of  living was on point. However, it is not enough to just do comparisons to the cost-of-living, etc. Statistics don’t actually help us get what we want. What does help is genuine struggle.

FIU is considered and has been for years now a school with a high population of ethnic minorities. In Florida alone, ethnic minorities are still behind in income and in wealth. For the entire country, ethnic minorities are the worst off. This is due to ongoing racial discrimination for which our current president, Donald Trump, seems to be playing into with his tweets for the past four years. These ethnic minorities like African Americans and Hispanics need to fight back, and to do this, we need to vote in the Democratic primaries come March 17.

We need to understand that those who take jobs that pay under ten dollars an hour aren’t just students. They’re taken by college graduates and those without a college degree, but have experience elsewhere. These people are human beings and they struggle to actually pay the bills, like student loans and rent.

This is especially since in every paycheck, the U.S. Government takes about 7.65% in social security and Medicare taxes. This really means that a $9 an hour job at some retail shop is really about $8. That $10 an hour job is really nine, etc.

We all should be angry based on the fact that those taxes go towards the elderly who lived their life and worked. While they paid the same thing as us, their generation had more opportunities. 

We need a federal minimum wage that is at least thirteen dollars an hour to account for employment taxes we have to pay every week. So, I’d recommend that all of us at FIU vote for the most progressive candidate this year, this being Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, and we’ll finally get the progress we deserve.

Joshua Lane is an FIU alumni.

Letters to the Editor are not written by PantherNOW Staff. They are submitted by readers of Panther Press. These views are separate from editorials and reflect individual perspectives of contributing writers and/or members of the University community.

Featured image by hjl on Flickr.

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