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Comment by neuromancer2701 | Hacker News Reader

In additional most of these lower wage job should be for younger high school age or college students. A grown adult(lets say 25) shouldn't be working the entry level position at MickeyD's. That should be an outlying case and policy shouldn't be decided on corner cases.

Youth unemployment is significantly higher than the national average and if wages are mandated even higher then no one will take the chance on a 15 year old.

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> A grown adult(lets say 25) shouldn't be working the entry level position at MickeyD's. That should be an outlying case and policy shouldn't be decided on corner cases.

Maybe you think they shouldn't be, but statistics show they are. Good jobs are hard to come by and the median age of fast-food workers is 28[0] (meaning half are older than that). It's absolutely not a weird corner case. It's a very common thing, and if we don't want adults with kids working those jobs, we're going to have to reverse decades of economic trends and start creating lots of better-paying jobs for marginally skilled workers.

[0] http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/11/mcjobs-s...

Uniquely, it seems the act of grilling meat, and putting that between slices of bread, is harder to automate than driving a car. Or at least it's hard to automate for less than $15 an hour. Err $8 an hour.

I would argue that if the FEDs mandate 15$/hour, the impetus to automate the grilling and sandwich making will increase.

I dunno, I don't think it is an unreasonable aim of society that if you are supplying your labour to someone (why shouldn't this include McD's?), that you are able to at least live a reasonable life.

By that I mean secure accomodation (not large, but comfortable), food and transport.

The issue what is a reasonable life? We make our enlisted soldiers live in a barracks and eat cafeteria food. Minimum wage could afford that sort of lifestye. And I think it's fair to expect a job to provide for that. It could provide a dorm experience.

But I don't think it's fair to expect it to support a family or a solo apartment.

Because a lot of minimum wage workers do live with mom and dad or live in a bunch of buddies. Artificially increasing their salaries hurts families who have to pay more for products and services.

Who is actually building these barracks-style accommodations for minimum wage workers?

That is something that occurred in the early days of industrialization, and still occurs in factory towns in newly industrializing economies, but not in the contemporary US. Where everyone is expected to finance a car and a single-family detached house.

This is a deep problem -- but not one to solve by messing with the minimum wage. It's largely a zoning issue. High-density housing lowers nearby property values (for many reasons), which means people tend to vote against policies that would allow it.

See also the recent HN discussion about trailer parks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9592812

The problem is letting local people vote for it at all.

There are real external costs that impact the neighborhood, but what's needed is a more rational way of managing local real estate externalities. A bad solution is a solution of a kind, even if it's not a very good one.

Yes, the original other way to read the image in the OP is as "localities with an insufficient supply of housing".

Barracks-style housing is just so much further than higher-density housing though. About the only time true barracks accommodations are built is for factories or similar institutions in specific circumstances.

Nobody is now, but 7.50 an hour could provide for that based on current residential space costs and food costs.

And a lot of minimum wage workers are trying to support families. And they got minimum wage work because that's all that was available. And they can't go back to school to get a better job because they have mouths to feed and rent to pay.

So what should those people be doing? What job are you going to give them?

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