Do my parents need to pay me minimum wage?
Yes they do. Here is the main page on minimum wage for the province of British Columbia.  This page lists exemptions from BC minimum wage laws, but there are none for working in a family business, or for being underage. Students are exempted only if they are on approved work study. Generally all provinces apply minimum wage laws to every employee. "There is actually a restriction on how high a wage they can pay you. There didn't use to be, but now it has to be reasonable for the work you are doing, so they can't pay you $100/hr while other people doing the same work get minimum wage. You might ask why on earth a parent would want to pay a child way more than they're worth? The salary is tax deductible to the company. Then the child pays their ""expenses"" - hockey fees and equipment, field trips, birthday presents for their friends and so on - out of the money the company paid them.  They also save for their post-secondary education. The rest of the family budget now has a little more room, and the parents can lower their own salaries if they have expensive children. This means more net money in the company and less total income tax paid by the family for the same total income. My concern is that if your parents don't know whether or not you must be paid minimum wage (you must, there's no family exemption) then they also don't know whether you should have EI deducted (probably not) and various other special cases like eligibility for summer student subsidies. The firm's accountant should be able to help with these things and the company should know all this. It's not the role of a 14 year old to ask the Internet how to run a business, the business owners should know it."
"Your ignorance of global finance and business is showing through.  &gt;Nothing ""conspiratorial"" - just standard tax optimization scheme as shown by  Google &amp; Apple.  The tech industry is fundamentally different from retailing.  That you can't see this is mind boggling.  There is nothing ""standard"" about the tax optimization schemes done by Apple and Google that can be copied by grocers.  Apple and Google have vast international operations with revenue coming from multiple countries.  They are asset light and have very high profit margins.  Grocery stores have very small / negligible international operations and are asset heavy.  Try also have very low profit margins.  &gt;From the point of supply and demand, they are actually overpaid - lots of desperate people that agree to the barest minimum allowed by law (and below that, if you include illegal aliens). Still doesn't mean they are paying the living wage.  Mentioning living wages in an argument about supply and demand tips off that you have no clue what you are talking about.  Living wage is irrelevant to the supply and demand for labor.  What you call ""desperation"" for a job dismissed many of the perfectly logical reasons why somebody may choose to work for a low wage.  You assume that the equilibrium wage for grocery store workers is below the minimum wage - falsely.  Walmart workers make more than minimum wage, on average, before benefits are taken into account.  Illegal aliens can't do most grocery store jobs because (1) they can't speak English, and (2) they probably can't do the math needed to be a cashier.  Teenagers (the vast majority of minimum wage workers) are increasingly choosing not to work.  The supply of people that are able to do these types of jobs is probably not much bigger than it is already.  &gt;20% are imported.  And they don't have to set up a ""supply chain"" - just the bare minimum to legally siphon funds into another company they own, be it via interest on credit, rent, intellectual property (i.e. franchise or trademark payments) or anything else.  This is laughable, do you really believe this?  Grocery stores have absolutely MASSIVE supply chain risk.  Arguably their entire value proposition is in supply chain.  You seem to think there's an evil cabal moving money around to screw people over.  This is left wing bullshit conspiracy stuff.  You sound like a left wing version of Alex Jones.  Show me clear evidence that a grocer is doing this, including references in their actual financial statements." "If the country went to a sustainable minimum wage like 15 dollars an hour we would benefit more. Anyone who thinks the walmart strikes are stupid and they should be fired clearly doesnt understand how the economy should work.  Oh?  You do know that all basic goods and services would increase  in price, right?  Raising the minimum wage will not raise minimum value.  ""If you are pro for under 15 dollars an hour, you are pro slavery.""  Haha. Slaves are forced.  You aren't forced to work for minimum wage.  It's a result of many poor life decisions that led you there.  The fact that I'm not working a minimum wage job is because I worked my ass off to learn the skills I needed to make a good living.  ""The only people making these facts up are the ones who own the businesses because their wealth will go down and be spread among employees more.""  Not really.  As a business owner, I would just increase the costs of my goods or services.  Most retail businesses have slim profit margins (restaurants are even worse).  They would not be able to survive long if their workforce cost suddenly doubled and their revenue stayed the same.  You don't know much about business. I'm glad people like you aren't making decision in government." Fair enough, either way if your skills are at the minimum wage level you should NOT be supporting a kid and a women/man. How can you expect to provide a decent life if you are making that much? No the government shouldn't force businesses to pay more, you should be earning more if you want to raise a kid and a significant other. I'm not comparing it to basic needs, I'm saying you have a CHOICE, you can choose to bring a kid into your life or not, and if you are on minimum wage it does no good for anyone, not the person earning, not the kid, not the business, no one.   Is that so hard to understand? It's economics 101, increasing the minimum wage leads to only negative consequences, and in this digital age they will be coming sooner rather than later. I find indexing minimum wage to inflation helps put upward pressure on non minimum wages due to behavior of humans. If a person working at say $30/hr sees someone working at minimum wage getting a pay raise, the person at $30/hr is going to feel like they are falling behind and more likely to ask for a raise.   I do not shop at Wal-Mart due to how they treat their employees. "First, it's clear from your story that you very likely should be able to receive some financial aid.  That may be in the form of loans or, better, grants in which you just get free money to attend college.  For example, a Pell grant.  You won't get all you'd need for a free ride this way, but you can really make a dent in what you'd pay.  The college may likely also provide financial aid to you.  In order to get any of this, though, you have to fill out a FAFSA.  There are deadlines for this for each state and each college (there you would ask individually).  I'd get looking into that as soon as you can. Do student loans have to be paid monthly?  Any loan is a specific agreement between a lender and a borrower, so any payment terms could apply, such as bimonthly or quarterly.  But monthly seems like the most reasonable assumption.  Generally, you should assume the least favorable (reasonably likely) terms for you, so that you are prepared for a worst-case scenario.  Let's say monthly. Can I just, as I had hoped, borrow large sums of money and only start   paying them after college? Yes.  That is a fair summary of all a student loan is.  Importantly, though, some loans are federal government subsidized loans for which the interest on the loan is paid for you as long as you stay in college + 6 months (although do check that is the current situation).  Unsubsidized loans may accrue interest from the start of the loan period.  If you have the option, obviously try hard to get the subsidized loans as the interest can be significant.  I made a point to only take subsidized loans.   WARNING: Student loans currently enjoy a (nearly?) unique status in America as being one of the only loan types that are not forgivable in bankruptcy.  This means that if you leave college with $100,000 in debt that begins accruing interest, there is no way for you to get out of it short of fleeing the country or existence.  And at that point the creditors may come after your mother for the balance.  These loans can balloon into outrageous amounts due to compounding interest.  Please have a healthy fear of student loans.  For more on this, listen to this hour long radio program about this. Would a minimum wage job help,  Of course it will ""help"" but will it ""help enough""?  That depends on how much you work.  If you make $7.50/hr and work 20 hrs/week for all but 3 weeks of the year, after taxes you will be adding about $6,000 to offset your costs.  In 3 years of college (*see below), that's $18,000, which, depending on where you go, is not bad at helping defray costs.  If you are at full-time (40 hrs), then it is $12k/yr or $36k toward defraying costs.  These numbers are nothing to sniff at. Do you have any computer/web/graphics skills?  It's possible you could find ways to make more than minimum wage if you learn some niche IT industry skill.  (If I could go back and re-do those years I wouldn't have wasted much time delivering pizzas and would have learned HTML in the 90s and would have potentially made some significant money.) would college and full-time job be manageable together?  That's highly specific to each situation (which job?  how far a commute to it?  which major? how efficient are you?  how easily do you learn?) but I would say that, for the most part, it's not a good idea, not only for the academic-achievement side of it, but the personal-enrichment aspect of college.  Clubs, sports, relationships, activities, dorm bull sessions, all that good stuff, they deserve their space and time and it'd be a shame to miss out on that because you're on the 2nd shift at Wal-Mart 40hrs/week. How do I find out what scholarships, grants, and financial aid I can apply for?  Are you in a high school with a career or guidance counselor?  If so, go to that person about this as a start.  If not, there are tons of resources out there.  Public libraries should have huge directories of scholarships.  The Federal Student Loan program has a website.  There are also a lot of resources online found by just searching Google for scholarships--though do be careful about any online sources (including this advice!). Sermon: Lastly, please carefully consider the overall cost vs. benefit to you.  College in 2012 is anything but cheap.  A typical price for a textbook is $150 or more.  Tuition and board can range over $40k at private colleges.  There is a recent growing call for Americans to re-think the automatic nature of going to college considering the enormous financial burden it puts many families under.  Charles Murray, for one, has put out a book suggesting that far too many students go to college now, to society's and many individuals' detriment (he's a controversial thinker, but I think some of his points are valid and actually urgent).  With all that said, consider ways to go to college but keep costs down.  Public colleges in your state will almost always be significantly cheaper than private or out-of-state.  Once there, aim for As and Bs--don't cheat yourself out of what you pay for.  And lastly, consider a plan in which you complete college in three years, by attending summer courses.  This website has a number of other options for helping to reduce the cost of college." What's the basis for this statement? I think maybe we'd have a disagreement on the definition of fair?  E: fyi, many middle to low class Americans would have much worse lives if they baseline the min wage to $15. Companies pass that cost on, they don't eat it on their margins. But reddit wouldn't like or understand that, they'll keep bitching instead. "Your first article is all about analyzing the effect of minimum wage on employment by looking at rents. Their analysis ""assumes peoples' utility functions in a particular city depend on wages plus amenities less the cost of rent available in that city""  Basically if wages go up (due to a minimum wage hike for example) the city is more desirable to live in and people would lay more to live there. That is not at all the mechanism you were talking about and would not apply for a national raise in minimum wage.   Why should I read the rest of your links when you didn't even read the first one?" "That was just one example, there are other things that could be implemented. Some countries, like the UK, have different wages for lower age groups. So your example could have an under 21 or an ""under 24"" wage, unless married or legally emancipated like with the FAFSA. Or we could expand the work-study program so that students can get jobs and employers pay part of the salary and taxes covers some.   Or there's a limit on the number of employees that can be considered on apprenticeship at any given time. There are lots of ways to address things.   We already have various rules that have exceptions for different industries. Farmhand wages, tipped workers, etc. There could be other options."