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Comment by mdoms | Hacker News Reader

> The direct effect of the minimum wage is to make certain low-productivity jobs illegal. Consider that for a moment: a person with limited skills and/or needs is simply prohibited from doing low-productivity work regardless of desire.

Has this ever been shown to be the case? Use real data or case studies.

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McDonalds locations now have replaced most of their cashiers with touchscreens.

minimum wage in the usa has been largely static or declining since 1968, if you control for inflation (1). Given that, it seems like the thing driving the mcdonalds cashier job losses are not minimum wage laws, but rather technology and probably the economic pressure to maximize shareholder value caused by the stock market.

(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_Sta...)

Did this happen in response to minimum wage?

Yes, because if there were no minimum wage, they would simply pay employees less and forget about the touchscreens.

So these touch screens are not being introduced in countries with low or no minimum wage?

This is incorrect; There were multiple steps of acceptance of the touchscreens including order accuracy, expediency, and customer interaction.

If McDonalds could pay less, not train employees, have them touch buttons accurately, and customers enjoyed interacting with those people; then, and only then is what you have said close to truthful.

What you have proposed is that the internet wouldn't send electronic bits if we just paid mail carriers more.

Walmart eliminated all greeters last year.

Was there a corresponding increase in minimum wage?

No, but I don't think that makes the point any less relevant.

Well either the greeters became more expensive or their utility dropped, if we're taking a simplistic market-based approach. So which is it?

And yet this year I see people standing outside the front door with a box of masks, ensuring everyone is masked before entering, and greeting people at the same time.

The fact that they were hired back during a pandemic isn't a good counter-argument, greeters obviously add very small value to the company under normal circumstances.

Back-breaking farm work is done largely by humans who are present in the country illegally.

So the fields would be left fallow if governments enforced their laws properly?

In some cases, yes. California farms are having problems finding people to work in fields since border control got tighter, and American's don't want to do the work, even for $15+ an hour. The farm owners said they're switching crops over to ones that are easier to harvest with machines. Similar things have happened in the South-East USA, where crops have been left to rot on the field because the government started cracking down on illegal immigrant labor, and no citizens want to fill the positions.

https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-farms-immigration/

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/14/alabama-immigr...

This seems like a short term phenomenon as the market adjusts. Over time, consumer prices of labor-intensive produce will rise relative to non-labor-intensive produce.

If you had to find a humanitarian angle here, you should ask what the people who were previously working in the fields should do for work instead. Is unemployment the only alternative? Or can the large numbers of people who are currently migrant workers be incorporated into the economy in a different but productive way? I don't have good answers to those questions.

Every year struggling farms go out of business[1]. If expenses are a bit higher, a bit more farms will go under.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2020/02/10/us-far...

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