Setting a minimum wage just sets an artificial control on the market without accounting for any of the consequences of that limit. It sounds nice. Doesn't work.
Discussion
I think that's just corporate propaganda. Sounds smart and forward thinking, vaguely alludes to unforeseen consequences, dismisses the idea without any real rebuttal. Workers quite literally fought and died for our labor rights, and business REALLY wants to claw back those gains. Throughout America's prosperous period from post-WW2 up into like the 80s or 90s, minimum wage was always higher in value than it is right now.
Taxes were way higher on the rich, too. That's another propaganda point they try to claim won't work but clearly did. Maybe it would be a good idea to consider who benefits the most from the idea that it's just not possible to reasonably make sure people are taken care of. It's almost ALWAYS the rich.
That's a false equivalence, though. A minimum wage isn't the right to some money. It's not even the right to a job. It's a restriction placed upon business to restrict their ability to exploit the imbalanced power dynamic that is inherent to the employer-employee relationship. It's a statement backed by force of law that if you want someone to devote a large portion of their time towards your profit margins, you must pay them at least enough to cover the basic needs that would acrue over that time.
No it's the same. A minimum wage is claiming you have a right to a minimum amount of money regardless of the effort you put in. That's literally what it is.
Except you can still get fired for doing a shit job. Except employers aren't obligated to hire you. Except you don't get the money if you don't go to work and at least pretend to try. Except you don't even have to be employed.
A minimum wage doesn't guarantee you money. It only mandates that if your employer is happy enough with your output to keep you on staff, they must pay you at least so much. Your employer is totally free to refuse to give you any more work, fire you, and stop paying you. New employers aren't obligated to even hire you in the first place.
It's sort of a right, but only within the confines of a consensual and revocable agreement that nobody is forced to make in the first place. Well, the worker sort of is forced to make the agreement with SOMEone to avoid homelessness and starvation, but the employer is free to decide they're making enough profits. If the labor genuinely doesn't provide enough value, they'll just not hire people. But no matter how much they grumble and cry about it, they keep hiring because turns out you were actually worth it all along.
None of that negates the fact that it's a market manipulation that hurts the bottom line workers more than it helps them. Esp people of color.
In what way does it hurt them? I've heard the claim before, but I've never once heard it articulated into something specific, nor have I seen it paired with defensible evidence.
It artificially raises the cost of employment without adding any value to the productivity. In every case, it results in hiring less workers. That's evidenced in the unemployment rates, going back at least as far as the 1960s for example, where it went from 14% to 24% among white teens and up over 30% among black teens.
It's legal discrimination against people that are perceived as being low skilled labor. There's no substance to it as a fundamental policy. It's a bandaid on a hemorrhage.
It looks good on paper. Doesn't perform well in practice.
We need to be reducing barriers for minimum wage earners and employers. Not just telling them to deal with it.
The legal discrimination is the only real claim here. The rest is effectively meaningless, making bold but extremely vague claims that can't really be meaningfully evaluated and responded to.
And as for that discrimination, that's an... Unexpected claim. I suppose you could consider it a sort of positive discrimination in the sense that you're selectively putting upward pressure on their wages in particular.
Given it applies to ALL workers, however, it doesn't seem accurate. Especially considering how much some groups want to raise minimum wage. Some want to increase it beyond what some SKILLED labor makes, which means some skilled labor would get a federally mandated raise, which really hurts claims of discrimination based on level of skilled labor.
I would consider it much more of a general labor right. ALL workers who labor for someone else's profits are, according to minimum wage laws, entitled to some minimum level of wages.
Frankly, if your business cannot afford to pay its workers enough to reasonably survive, you're running a failed business. Your profits are being subsidized by your workers' support network, whether that be other laborers or some sort of tax funded social service. Every worker on food stamps is a corporate subsidy from your taxes. Every worker who needs a roommate to afford rent has their roommate helping contribute to business profits. Every 20+ unable to move out and living with their parents still has those parents contributing to corporate profits. Everyone who helps prop up a full time worker so they can survive in spite of their wages is covering the cost of business for them because they're the ones ensuring those workers can survive and return to work again. Without them, workers end up hungry and/or on the streets until they can't afford to work or become too sick or simply starve.
A minimum wage acknowledges this reality and puts the onus back on the employer. The employer wants labor. The employer needs a healthy, capable worker. Workers have basic needs that must be met economically. Why should business reap all the benefits and outsource as many of the expenses as possible? Why are we as a society responsible for picking up their shortcomings and seeing to the needs of their workers for them? Why do their profits mean more than put basic necessities? Just because their name is on the paperwork while our blood, sweat, and tears are on the tools and the products?
Having dug into these claims some and checked out some of the research, it seems the waters are pretty muddy. I found plenty to support my view, and I think the balance lies in my favor, but I don't think I'll have a meaningful chance of convincing you of that by citing individual papers. I could collect a bunch of papers to cite, but you'd find your own so you could counter with some other papers, we could maybe go back and forth over quality of them, and ultimately, neither of us would make a convincing argument for the other that way.
So I'm going to approach this a slightly different way. Let's consider which side is more likely to experience bias. It's well established at this point that research funded by a group with goals has a strong tendency to agree with those goals, even when the facts don't actually align with those goals. That is, research funded by biased groups produces biased results. They don't pay for research that doesn't support them, and if they do, they bury the results the best they can.
With that in mind, let's consider what groups could conceivably be clouding the issue with faulty, biased research. Let's look at the side opposing minimum wage first. This is a pretty obvious one. Every employer is against it because it can even lead to growth in wages well above the minimum, and they want to protect their profits. Every business is in favor of denying an increase. It's in the best interest of every rich family, every corporate think tank, basically everyone with an excessive amount of wealth. Hell, to an extent, even government funded research is suspect simply because the government consistently acts in the best interest of business when forced to choose between them and the people.
Now, contrast that with groups in favor of increasing minimum wage. I don't see near the capacity to influence research here. The primary group in favor of this is the working class, and even then, primarily the poorest among them. They're unlikely to form any sort of lobbying group or think tank or research institute because they simply can't afford it. Unions may have some incentive, but they've been utterly thrashed in recent decades, so they're not really potent enough by my estimate. I can't think of anything else, really, but I'd legitimately love to hear other options if you can suggest some.
From this perspective, it seems far, far, FAR more likely that dishonest, biased, or otherwise faulty research would favor denying an increase. Almost all moneyed interests favor keeping wages low. Given that, I think it's MUCH more likely that the truth leans in favor of a reasonable minimum wage. I understand that there may still be imperfections and problems to address, but on the whole, I think balance lies in favor of maintaining and increasing minimum wage.