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Comment by Shacklz | Hacker News Reader

> If someone is not highly skilled and works low end jobs, he could be left jobless if minimum wage increases.

If you made this argument 100 years ago I might be inclined to agree with you, but "reasonable" minimum wages (i.e.: a 40h/week job pays always enough to feed a family and a roof over your head) have been tried and tested in countries all over the world and as far as I'm aware, they're almost always a success.

The 'low skill worker' losing job opportunities because of too high minimum wages is a myth that just doesn't hold up to reality, no matter how many times conservatives afraid of losing their own bottom line or relative status repeat it.

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It may have less of an effect than it is claimed, in some jobs the demand is there regardless of wages, so any increase in cost gets transferred to the consumer. If your janitor gets a 20% increase, it is doubtful he will get sacked because he is needed. But if the same happens to a person packing boxes or working and McDonalds, he might lose a job to overseas or a new automated machine.

If you take it to extreme, it's obvious it's not a myth. Imagine a 100k USD yearly minimum wage. Obviously all unskilled worked wouldn't be able to earn this much for the employed, but in places where you have to have someone do the job, they'd enjoy their new high minimum wage.

You might be interested in this article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/08/opinion/sunday/us-denmark... (note that technically, Denmark has no minimum wage - but mechanism that essentially enforce the same)

A few quotes here:

> Starting pay for the humblest burger-flipper at McDonald’s in Denmark is about $22 an hour once various pay supplements are included.

> Americans might suspect that the Danish safety net encourages laziness. But 79 percent of Danes ages 16 to 64 are in the labor force, five percentage points higher than in the United States.

While the argument might be overblown in many cases you can’t really deny that many South/South-Western European countries have huge youth unemployment rates, especially in low incomes areas, which can at least partially be attributed to minimum wage laws.

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