Imagine waking up early around 7am getting in the shower and going to a boring job at 8am. Only to stay there for 9 hours and come home to no food in the fridge. No food in the freezer. A broken dining room chair, all because you only get paid $7.25 an hour. Well unfortunately that is a reality for some people across America. Indiana being one of those states with a $7.25 an hourly minimum wage. There has been an ongoing discussion and debate for the past couple years about minimum the minimum wage in America. As of right now it is a State legislation. States can decide what their minimum wages are set at, however it has to be at least $7.25. This ongoing debate to raise the minimum wage to $15 is on all sorts of mediums. I take a further look into this debate by looking at three different mediums of where this debate is happening. I look at the discussion on twitter, as well as on YouTube and I take an interesting dive into Minimum wage memes.
First, I started with twitter. Twitter is the perfect social media platform for Millennial's, and this debate has a lot of millennial's tweeting. I came across a profile called Fight for 15 which is exactly what you think it is. It is a profile of roughly 50,000 followers that speak up against underpaid workers. Their Bio says it all.
The fight for 15 account tweets pretty regularly, as I have been following them for about a month now. Some of their posts include various number of updates around the country of what other states are doing about the minimum wage. It also informs people about what companies are doing about the minimum wage and benefits to their employees. Recently it has been a lot about McDonald's and how they are taking great steps to try to improve working environments and wages for their employees.
It is interesting to see this because there is a McDonalds by where I live in Chicago (Oak Brook, Illinois) where they pay their employees a minimum of $15 an hour. Which was more than I was making by being a manager at a movie theater. So, I was obviously was a bit jealous. Anyway, for an account Fight for $15 that has over 50,000 followers I was quite disappointed in their analytics and engagement overall. I took their average likes and retweets for the last month and averaged it out. On every post they only average about 10 retweets and 27 likes. That is astounding when you think about how many people see their content on their timelines. Over 50,000 follow this account.
So why is this information on twitter? Its simple. The demographics on twitter is the meat and potatoes for this movement. Millennials. It is an easy platform to spread awareness and information about the minimum wage debate. Twitters demand are people with low attention spans. When it comes to attention spans Twitter falls in between Facebook and snapchat. Facebook being a social media for older generations, thus having a greater attention span. Then snapchat is typically for younger generations who have lower attention spans. So, there is where twitter is beneficial. However, twitter does have some constraints and that is engagement. Twitter is algorithm playground that relies on engagement. So for an account that has a very abysmal engagement rate not a lot of people out there are saying their content that hurt the account.
Next, I took a look at YouTube. Talk about an algorithm playground. The minimum wage debate is all over YouTube right now. From videos spanning from 4-minute mini viral videos to 30-minute rants about the topic. This is a great platform to make videos that people want to watch. Unlike twitter people who use YouTube are willing to sit through a 10-minute video because that is what the platform is about. I took a look at two YouTube videos. The first one comes from ABC and it’s a quick video about the cons of raising the minimum wage.
Its an interesting point they discuss quickly in the video that by increasing the minimum wage it could lead to small businesses closing down. With small business making a lot less capital then let’s say McDonalds they cannot physically pay their employees a lot. So this causes these small business to close down. The overall question they ask in the video is if the minimum wage is doing more harm, and that’s a tricky question to answer. In the above short 1 minute piece closing of small businesses is definitely a con of raising the minimum wage, but the next video has a different side.
The next video is by VOX. Now, not the most credible thing on YouTube but it does bring up some solid points that need to be a part of this discussion. The first thing that caught my attention is their argument that technically the minimum wage hasn’t been raised in 10 years and every time is has been raised, inflation has knocked it down. (Around the :47 second mark). I agree that federally the minimum wage hasn’t changed, but states are raising it themselves. Inflation is a great argument for raising the minimum wage. Things are more expensive. Gas. Water. Food. Everything is just a little pricier. So, it makes sense o pay employees more. So, they can keep up with the times.
VOX does make the point that we go about a decade without raising the minimum wage so when we do it’s a drastic change. Leading to small business not being able to keep up with the increase of wages. Making these smaller businesses to go out of business which we do not want. So their solution is to just raise by a small number every year so it is not so drastic. I personally like that idea.
These videos benefit by being on YouTube and not on another social media platform like Twitter because YouTube is where you can spread your opinion, and people will listen. If you log onto YouTube, you have a mindset of watching a video. Whether that is 2 min long or 7 min long you are willing to sit through that. Another benefit of YouTube is that you can search for what you want. Maybe you are interested in the con side of the minimum wage debate so you can search for it. However, this could be a constraint. On YouTube, through algorithms and big data sometimes you only see what you want to see. You aren’t open minded to the debate you just research your biased side.
Real quick I want to bring up filter bubbles. I believe there are filter bubbles on YouTube. You may be asking yourself what are filter bubbles? Filter bubbles are a way google organizes their searches based on what they think you want to see. Note google owns YouTube and their ad space. It is a very interesting topic to me that takes a while for your head to wrap around. So I will make it a little easier with an example. Say you and a friend of yours is researching “Florida.” That is all you and your friend put into the little search bar at the top. When you hit search, you get news of Hurricanes hitting the coasts. Maybe about an alligator attack. Maybe about what’s happening in Little Habana. Just a lot of news stories about Florida, because YouTube and google know you love the news. You love researching so that’s what they gave you. Now let’s say your friend hits search and videos of beautiful beaches come up. Along with house tours. Condo tours. A video of the everglades and Disney World fun because your friend is a traveler and loves to do things of that nature. All you and your friend did was say the same exact thing in the search bar but got totally different results. This could be a constraint on YouTube. Only seeing things YouTube and or google want you to see. Mind blowing right? Enough about my tangent and on to minimum wage memes.
Memes are a great mob mentality thing in communication. Memes are used to make fun of a movement or to poke fun of where the movement is heading. Memes are a way to spread your political views in all honesty. The first meme I picked out above is Steve Harvey and who doesn’t like that. The meme is poking fun at the liberal party by telling them if we raise the minimum wage where is that money going to come from. The logical thing to say is that the price of goods will go up if we did raise the minimum wage, which is really not a bad thing. It kind of just evens itself out at the end of the day.
It was actually difficult to find a meme that was in support of $15 an hour. I really don’t know why. I believe this is due to the fact that memes are really used to make fun of a movement. Not really to support anything. Also, there is a thing that people tend to do. People jump on the bandwagon of being on the negative side of things, because it is easier to debate and doesn’t take the research. So, the second meme is of Bernie Sanders. Who is in support of $15 an hour and free college amongst other things. Anyways this is poking fun that Bernie Sanders maybe doesn’t even want $15 an hour because that is less money from him, and we know how greedy politicians can be.
Memes are a good way to get people talking. Also, they are very easy to use to understand to see real quick. Memes are also easy to send to other people and get their reaction. However, the cons of memes that I didn’t realize is that there are one sided. A lot of memes don’t have the research behind them like YouTube videos do or a tweet does. So, memes are uneducated and that’s what hurts them the most.
Overall the debate of raising the minimum wage is everywhere. In memes. On YouTube. On Twitter. Personally, I just want people to discuss and listen to others about the debate. Form your own opinion based on facts, anecdotes, statistics and research on both sides. I do not like to get political and I sit on a fence on most situations only leaning slightly towards a conservative view. That doesn’t mean that I never lean liberal on situations because I do. This is one of those situations. In my findings and research, I think we need to raise the minimum wage. Based on economics of business and price of goods I think It should come up. I’m taking an Aristotelian ethics approach here and I think it benefits more people if we raise the minimum wage. However, it doesn’t need to be at $15 an hour that is when we will see layoffs and big increases in price of goods.
Like I said I just want people to discuss the topic and know the pros and cons and then you can formulate their own opinion.