Think about high school kids trying to get a summer job. They don't need to survive on this wage, they simply need something productive to do over the summer.
Should my business be required to shell out $15/hr for a high school kid, when the value of his/her labor is way less than that?
[0] http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/06/10/upshot/minimum-wage.htm...
Also alarming is that the unemployment rate for young black men (16-17) is 45% right now.
"People at or below the federal minimum are:
Disproportionately young: 50.4% are ages 16 to 24;
24% are teenagers (ages 16 to 19).
Mostly (77%) white; nearly half are white women.
Largely part-time workers (64% of the total)."
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/09/08/who-makes-mi...
The teens most likely to work are not in school, and thus they actually need a living wage.
Youth enrolled in high school had an employment rate of 18 percent. This is down from 36 percent in 1995: http://www.childtrends.org/?indicators=youth-employment#stha...
And, again, the youth working while in school are more likely to come from lower socio-economic strata. They may in fact need that money.
And is that a good thing or something we should try to reverse? Employment has a ramp-up like anything else.
Trying to create a total order by comparing the two alternatives goes down a bad road. There's always someone in need, but if you try to optimize the entire economy around that one story, you will have a disaster.
Maybe it's best to just have more jobs, period, even with low pay? And then make up for needy cases some other way?
Why should that be anyone's responsibility but the company? Why should my tax dollars be used to subsidize some greedy business guy who can't be arsed to pay their employees enough to live on?
HTH
A high school kid making money regardless of his family's wealth is making money as a supplement to what the parents or guardians should already be receiving from the government or otherwise, assuming they aren't emancipated but that is a very special case. If the parents can't afford to meet the basic needs of their child despite how ever much welfare they receive then why should the state allow for a child to remain in that home?
There are frequently waiting lists, restrictions (my favorite is disability, where you are not allowed to work, but are given barely enough money for yourself to live on), and miles of red tape associated with government subsidies. There's also the very real cost to the pride of the entire family associated with these subsidies.
> why should the state allow for a child to remain in that home
Because moving a child is incredibly traumatic for the child and expensive for the state?
I pulled my (small) suburban cities budget which is a many hundred page long PDF and parks and rec runs 40-something neighborhood city playground type parks and 2 pools on 2.3 million total per year. Of which staggeringly only 1.5 mil are wages (we live in a rough climate, maintenance costs are high, over $100K spend on electric bills alone, etc).
On the revenue side the two public pools combined pulled in about 1/3 of a million from fees collected at the door. Its pretty cheap compared to commercial entertainment (movie, restaurant, etc), they could certainly charge more without excluding too many people, given how much it costs to live here.
I know from experience that they have a couple kid lifeguards at each pool all the time so lets say 10 total staff at all instants (LOL no) at $15/hr for 10 or so hours per day (LOL no not open that much), open about 100 days a year (LOL no they'd be ice skating in the spring on the pool if that were the case), if I multiplied this out correctly in my head, at $15/hr, the kid lifeguards cost $150K/yr while bringing in $340K of revenue. Note that I don't have the misfortune of living in CA, so the actual cost of a seasons lifeguards at the two pools is more like $80K.
The cities very gross profit margin if by a miracle pools were free to build and maintain, just revenue divided by kid labor, is roughly $340K/$80K right now and if the min wage were $15 it would "collapse" to $340K/$150K which still ain't bad.
Honestly I suspect the pool spends more on chlorine and electricity than on the kids labor.
The capital cost is no laughing matter. The most recent ADA compliant complete remodel was something like $2M which for that one pool is roughly a decades revenue.
This quick analysis leads to the conclusion that open hours for the pool are insanely profitable, and the "pool biz" is overall dominated by capital costs. The kids pay is irrelevant.
Yes. Otherwise why would you hire the someone who actually does need to live on that wage?