Wake County employees have received a pay bump to a $13.50 per-hour minimum wage. This is a fantastic move, and a wage increase is long overdue for everyone.

The Wake County Board of Commissioners got the $13.50 figure from Universal Living Wage Organization’s “living wage” for Wake County — the hourly wage that someone can earn working full time while spending no more than 30 percent of their gross income on housing. The Universal Living Wage Organization reports the living wage of someone with a one-bedroom apartment in the Raleigh-Cary area as at least $14.88 per hour; a person can afford to live reasonably in Raleigh earning $14.88. This is roughly the same as many other metropolitan areas, such as Atlanta, Charlotte, Durham and Charleston, and it is only 12 cents less than many advocates, myself included, would like to see the minimum wage raised.

Opponents of the raise to $15 argue that it would place the salaries of minimum wage workers’ earnings nearly equal to people in supposedly more important careers, such as teachers and military personnel. Working full time at $15 an hour yields a pay of $31,200 per year before taxes, while a first-year teacher in North Carolina earns $35,000 per year and Private First Class (E3) in the Army with less than two years’ experience earns just under $24,500, although they receive healthcare and housing allowances. This assumption is inaccurate, and it dismisses the real people behind services we often take for granted. Not only are many teachers and military service members critically underpaid for their services, but the people who serve food and stock shelves are no less deserving of a living wage. Those people who serve food and stock shelves are not all teenagers either, contrary to many degrading and dehumanizing arguments. The average age of a person earning less than $10 per hour in the United States is 35 years old, and the vast majority of them are age 20 or older.

I could quote statistics all day, and I could talk extensively about the economic benefits of raising the minimum wage — not only would the cost of goods go up by only pennies on the dollar to cover the increase in pay, raises have no significant negative impact on the economy. Extra spending money in the middle and lower class is undoubtedly good for our economy, and a minimum wage hike would reduce government spending on welfare programs by billions. But at the end of the day, these are just numbers, and the way we treat people should not be determined by calculations and statistics.

I don’t speak for the single parents trying to raise children on $7 and a quarter per hour. I won’t claim to represent the millions of adults who could not afford to go to college and now work for minimum wage, or those paying their way through college on $7.25. However, I will not ignore these people either. I will not assume they are lazy, or without any marketable skills or undeserving of a living wage.

At the end of the day, although a minimum wage raise to $15 is a smart economic decision, it is a sensible human decision. Nobody deserves to work 40 hours a week for half a living wage. Nobody deserves to have their full-time work dismissed as an “entry-level job.” But, everybody deserves to be treated like a human.