Excerpt from Brown Alumni Monthly, Vol. 82: May, 1982 According to the best available studies, both private and governmental, there is no evidence that areas with the highest youth uh employment rates would benefit from a sub-minimum wage. There is, however, evi dence that a youth sub-minimum would have several harmful effects: 70 percent of the workers who are now paid the minimum wage are adults, two-thirds of them are women, many of whom are the heads of households. The sub-minimum would place these people into direct competition for jobs with a more attractive, cheaper, youth force. Four of every five unemployed workers are not teenagers, yet an older unemployed worker would be priced out by a lower paid teenager. Professor Grossman's solution is not to increase the size of the pie to provide more jobs but to increase the competition for an increasingly smaller share of wealth. The minimum wage in 1967 was an hour. The current minimum wage of an hour was worth only in 1967 dollars in January 1981. What does Professor Gross man offer, in reality, by advocating a wage floor beneath this already eroded one? He would be advocating divisive competition at the lowest rungs of the workforce, at a time when the teenage population is shrinking and the over - twenty population is bulging. He would be undercutting job stability, as employers would be eager to drop teenage workers once they reached the age of twenty and were entitled to higher wages. He would be reducing the ability of older workers to find employment. He would be asking one group in our society to accept less than a de cent wage. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.