20,000 people were put out of jobs by employers who didn't want to pay them what they are worth and instead wanted to exploit them. If you can't afford to pay livable wages to your workers, your business shouldn't exist.
Now, for many that’s okay. People just have to be okay that that happens.
Also, now those people affected have no wages.
Never was minimum wage equivalent to a living wage. A living wage is an ill-defined term. Does it mean I can afford the smallest apartment and afford just enough food to survive or are we adding small luxuries to this?
None of the Nordic countries have a minimum wage --on the other hand they don't have a large undercurrent of illegal labor undercutting the minimum natives will accept as a minimum wage.
That said, I don't have a horse in this fight. I don't think business have a "right" to cheap labor and if they can't survive without it, then so be it. Of course people have to understand their services and goods will go up in price and they should be okay with that. Maybe they stop depending on someone else doing and making things for them and start making their own stuff at home.
Norway has minimum wage for some sectors (including unskilled labor), these minimums are also due to strong unions and collective agreements which have become law.
Denmark, no minimum wage but strong unions and collective agreements.
Finland has no legal minimum wage but also collective bargaining mandates minimum salaries.
All of these countries have strong social security nets.
This is, generously, misleading. In Norway for example the statutory minimum you can pay somebody in a particular sector like fast food will be negotiated with a union for that sector.
“It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country." - FDR, who signed for and pushed for the initial minimum wage legislation in the US.
It's really sad to see people repeat this take which is historically completely false.
Nah, most of them are most likely already employed somewhere else at a 25% wage increase.
Note that the unemployment actually didn't spike up according to a different study: https://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/california-minimum... so that allows us to assume these people got a better wage somewhere else, at only a marginal increase to the consumer.
One possible outcome is that if high minimum wages are placed across the board in all states and the feds enforce e-verify that we'll become a bit like Switzerland where everyone nominally earns more compared to other OECD countries but also things (good and services) are relatively more expensive too. It potentially could pull people who've been out of the labor pool (undercut by low wages/cheap labor) back in to it, if the right policies are put in place.
It's probably not a bad deal for US workers as we all would have a higher standard of living but also live in a more expensive society --in the end that's probably better for everyone (in the US).
We don’t need kids working in coal mines but we also don’t need to make it near impossible for them to get work experience at a part time job because their skill level doesn’t align with $20/hr.
Now if they pay the teenager half the wage the same adult is doing then someone is getting a raw deal.
Said who? The same people who don't pay internships.
> but we also don’t need to make it near impossible for them to get work experience at a part time job because their skill level doesn’t align with $20/hr.
When minimum wage goes up, other more skilled labor also goes up, and adults will go somewhere better paid. Then the business will have no choice but hire the kids at the $20/hr and they will get that work experience you so want to bestow upon them. It's funny you are trying to twist it like it's gonna be a problem to find work experience for the poor poor kids, while all we know the business care about is how to exploit people at the lowest possible pay.
It's always "think of the children" with a specific crowd, an unhealthy obsession with children, I'd say.
Think of the children and ban XYZ books cause poor children can't comprehend what they are reading (allows us to ban books we don't like)
Think of the children and introduce chat control so we can track everybody and monetize their data (allows us to exploit everybody)
Think of the children and don't raise the minimum wage cause poor children can't find internships and part time jobs (allows us to exploit everybody)
There is a pattern here, not sure if you are ready to acknowledge it.
“We are going to increase minimum wage so you can have a livable wage!”
“Yay!…wait now I have no wages. Why didn’t this work like you said?”
It did. https://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/california-minimum...
"Though in the same month, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics showed California had approximately 750,000 fast food jobs, roughly 11,000 more than when the higher minimum wage law took effect"
"The Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at UC Berkeley compared Glassdoor job posts and online food menu prices two weeks before the minimum wage raise and 2 weeks after. It found that wages increased by 18%, employment numbers remained stable and menu prices increased by only 3 to 7%, or 15 cents on a $4 burger."
Employment numbers remained stable, which is great, meaning the 18k people now are employed at other places at at least 20-25% wage increase. I will repeat it again: If a business can't afford to pay its workers, the business shouldn't exist.
Fast food places have to compete with strong unions jobs like grocery stores as well.
Of course you can offer an easy life when you are burning reserves and ignoring the future.
Unfortunately our US counterparts think "growth" means getting obese and dying younger than us:
- https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/life-expectancy/ (48-th place in longevity, not bad, almost as good as Albania, one of the poorest and least developed countries in Europe that's not even in the European Union)
And being much much unhappier than us: https://data.worldhappiness.report/table (24-th place, not bad for people so invested in being #1).
I think where the US does shine is in obesity ratings, that's where we see the real meaning of "growth": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_obesity_r...
> Of course you can offer an easy life when you are burning reserves and ignoring the future.
You mean burning calories and looking forward to pension age? The first one Americans need more of, and the second one, sadly, not many Americans live to see.
In the UK which has a youth wage, has had negative productivity growth, and has had a series of extremely unpopular governments who needed to use minimum wage growth to support their growth, you have seen large employers mix towards younger staff (where that is possible, in other cases you have seen employers use government programs to import below minimum wage migrants) and let go older staff en masse (employers in the UK also have auto-enroll into pensions, but only over 22).
It simply isn't possible, particularly in economies that have structural problems, for productivity growth to just appear magically when politicians request it.
This is a classic problem with economic intervention: you intervene, change incentives, agents do something unexpected, and the result is more intervention, more distortion, on and on. Politically, this is gold because politicians look like they are doing something. No-one asks whether that thing needs to be done at all.
Decades of tax cut's for top financial class did not workout of everyone else, the extra money did not trickle down but was used to buy politicians to get more tax payer money
Raising minimum wage will close down businesses depending on exploitation and help businesses who are ethical enough to give working class their fair share.
some guy working 8-12 hours shift, has family and participate in community programs is suddenly getting deported to nowhere is making America safe again ?
This looks more like making lowest white people better than everyone else