Starting in 2012 in Chicago, the Fight for $15 campaign is a push from fast-food workers for a raise in their minimum wage – which currently sits at $7.25 an hour – to $15 an hour.

Workers in these establishments claim that they are working hard for such little money — money that hardly pays for rent, food and other needs.

The campaign’s website claims that 52 percent of the fast food workers are using some sort of public assistance to help balance out their low wages. Many are on food stamps, welfare or receive Medicaid benefits. While the cause is noble and the prize is sweet, I have a few problems with this Fight for $15.

I know that by graduating college, my average wage will be $16.81 an hour, according to CBS News. So if these fast-food workers’ wages are raised to $15 an hour, why would I graduate with thousands of dollars of student loan debt to make only $1.81 more than those who haven’t attended college? Now, I don’t want to sound ignorant, but I’m hoping my job entails more than pushing buttons into a cash register.

The job they are doing isn’t worth $15 an hour, plain and simple. But it definitely isn’t worth the meager hourly wage of $7.25 either.

I work two jobs, one at Baker itself for only $7.25 an hour, and I’m a waitress at a restaurant where I make $2.31 an hour, money that I never see because it is taken away for tax purposes. I don’t get a tax refund, I actually ended up paying the government over $300 this year, because the government says I make too much money.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand what it means to make little money. I understand paying rent, paying phone bills, paying utilities, paying car payments. I’m not fighting against the idea of pay raises so those who work can have a better life. But I am against the idea that my burger flipper at McDonald’s will make the same as me, while I have $10,000 of debt from my college degree.

Last year, a University of Kansas researcher found that McDonald’s would only have to charge 68 cents more for a Big Mac to pay its employees $15 hour. Many people would be willing to pay a little bit extra for a Big Mac if it meant the people serving it would be able to actually live off of their salary. But with capitalism, we have to have a system in place that rewards people based on the jobs they do. If we start paying fast-food workers $15 an hour, we will have to see other wages rise in order for the system to stay in place.

There is a larger problem out there, one that we’ve been trying to tackle since Occupy Wall Street, of tax breaks to the rich and how the “trickle down effect” is truly in place in America. We have CEOs at McDonald’s making 1,200 times the amount of the average worker, and this is a tradition in almost all facets of the economy.

So while the Fight for $15 campaign is good in theory, I fear that its anger is misplaced and will fail to bring about the changes it hopes to procure for its union members. We need a whole revamp of the economic structure of our economy before any of us will see the pay raises we deserve.