The first economic opportunity I found is equal pay for men
and women with the same job title. Of course there are many factors such as
experience and sometimes educational background but pay differences on average
are too big. On average women, in the same position as a man, makes 77% of what
the man would make. To me this is an opportunity because the pay difference is
unacceptable. If an employer has the confidence to hire someone to a position
the pay should be much more similar than it is regardless of gender. This is an
opportunity that is very easy to exploit. Positions within a company should
have a pay scale that is based on experience and position not anything else. I
don’t believe I am the only person to see this as an opportunity but for some reason
changes aren’t being made.
My second economic opportunity is raising minimum wage. This
has been an opportunity for a while but has seen very minimal raises that don’t
make a whole lot of difference. This is an opportunity because there are a lot
of people who work hard to make a difference and still go home not able to pay
the bills. Studies have been done that show even our standard 40 hour work week
is too long for maximized production and yet some people making near minimum
wage have two full time jobs. The prototypical customers are students who have
low income jobs because they are in school and mostly young adults. This would
be a little more difficult to change because it is a government change.
Companies and employers will not make this change on their own because it would
cost them more money.
My first regulatory change comes in the form of wild life
protection. As an animal lover and also an avid freshwater fisherman I have
noticed issues caused by pesticide sprays and other chemical substances that
make our grass look better but cause runoff into lakes. In the lake behind my
house, once a month they spray a pesticide on the shore to kill the weeds that also
hurts the fish. Since they started there has been a decline in fish and turtles
in the lake. Also when they spray the fish that nest near the shore stay away
for about a week. During nesting periods this becomes a huge issue. This
regulatory change states that there will be a change applied to 37 different
chemical substances that have been shown to affect growth in young fish. For
most people this isn’t an issue which is why it often goes over looked but
every piece of our ecosystem is very important in balancing numbers. To fix
this issue there would need to be many more regulatory changes but it is a step
in the right direction.
My other regulatory change involves our ozone and
atmosphere. So far this hurricane season we are starting to see what many
experts have been talking about when it comes to a raise in storm severity. As
a population on this planet it is our responsibility to do what we can to take
care of it as well as taking care of ourselves. This change involves less
emissions in order to improve air quality and environmental health. As a Floridian
who does not want to worry about constant threat of storms environmental
changes I would love to see these changes take effect. This is an
extraordinarily hard thing to accomplish as it takes incredible amounts of
people to make a change but would be well worth it to do so.
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