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Comment by jeza | Hacker News Reader

This thinking that people should be happy to work at a token wage than not at all worries me a bit. It might be okay for some teenagers who live at home with their parents and have their basic needs covered, but what about people who won't cover their cost of living with such a small amount?

Where I live the minimum wage is $15.96 an hour and it is not really even possible to live on that and have any quality of life.

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Ultimately in the absence of government subsidy people are paid what their labor is worth. If your labor is only worth $8/hr and the minimum wage is $15.96/hr, you won't get paid $15.96/hr. Whatever you would have done at $8/hr will be automated.

You usually get paid less than what your labor is worth. That's how a business builds up its savings account, or pays off its debts.

Nonsense. If that's the going rate for your labor, that's what it's worth. The fact that your employer can use your labor as part of a system that returns more value than the sum of its parts isn't relevant.

By that same logic, if government raises the rate, negotiating on your behalf, your labor is worth more.

As other have noted we'd all be rich if that were true. No, your labor is still only worth what someone else is willing to pay.

Your wages may go up temporarily because it takes time for employers to adjust. In the long run if you can't offer your employer more value than what he's paying you simply won't have a job.

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