A weakness of this metric is that you can raise it by having a high minimum wage and other policies that discourage the employment of less skilled workers, while reducing total income by shutting some people out of the labor market.
The pay-line above which a corporation will value automating over having an employee, is always moving for every job, and yes, they will automate jobs 'No-Matter-What-The-Minimum-Wage'. Jobs today that are minimum wage are already at risk for being automated and eliminated, changing the minimum wage only hastens or pushes out the time frame. It will happen.
Thus Increasing minimum wage is only forcing corporations to not use slaves. To keep the population above some starving threshold.
And of course, it pumps money back into economy since people have to spend their pay.
Honest question: why is this absurd? Slavery has been a widespread practice in history, and it is still ongoing in some places.
Corporations exist to make money. The brute mathematics of profit require costs to be reduced. To zero, if at all possible.
I'm just reacting to the current push in the US to drive down the lower and middle classes, and funnel so much wealth to just a few. A lot of this is done by wage suppression, so that corps can have higher profit.