America is rapidly falling behind its peers.
Its been well understood that taking care of your people is the key to prosperity, yet politically we seem to be more worried about ensuring the rich live their lives of leisure at the expense of our working class.
The bare minimum standard we should hold ourselves to is that a 40 hour work week should be able to put a roof over your head and food on your table.
The fact that the minimum wage is continuously supressed is absurd.
> The bare minimum standard we should hold ourselves to is that a 40 hour work week should be able to put a roof over your head and food on your table
Absolutely, but it seems to me that as long as companies have A) the option to not hire people and/or B) ways to side-step minimum wage with non-US labor, minimum wage won't achieve that goal for everyone. It will enable the goal for a few and the rest will have a 0 hour work week and a harder time getting any type of job.
But there's the other side of the question - why is a roof over your head and food on your table getting so expensive? That's what needs to be addressed. High rent/housing/food costs prevent cheap labor. There's no point in raising minimum wage to $20/hr if the price of food and rent keeps going up.
Inflation sucks but it is a basic reality. As a request to policy folks out there please consider advocating the minimum wage have some connection to local CPI. A demand for a $xx/hr minimum globally is going to be both too high and too low and irrelevant in a few years time either way. This should not be an issue that needs to be relitigated every 5-10 years just to get back to where we started. The minimum should be set to reflect a basic standard of living in a given locale and not an arbitrary number.
This is obviously good policy, but is effectively impossible because a large contingent of policymakers don't want there to be a minimum wage. In a past era they could trade votes for an $X/hr minimum in exchange for something they wanted, confident that any law they helped pass would be effectively obsolete in a few years anyway, while what they bargained for would live on. A proposal for a scaling minimum wage would never pass. This isn't just a dig at Republicans, by the way, there are plenty of fiscal conservatives among the Dems too.
Shameful, especially here in Wisconsin where the minimum wage is still set to $7.25/hour. And even more shameful the tactics used by gig-companies like Uber and DoorDash to depress their own liabilities, and worker wages, even further down.
"No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country." -- Franklin D. Roosevelt
The pace with which the cost of living is rising is staggering. Heck, I remember the fight for 15 (referring to the campaign to raise the federal minimum wage to $15/h) a decade ago, but I don't see how someone could live on that, $2600/mo pre-tax income, in most of the country these days either. That's like 60%+ of your gross income on rent for a typical 1br across large swaths of the country, no?
> I don't see how someone could live on that, $2600/mo pre-tax income, in most of the country these days either. That's like 60%+ of your gross income on rent for a typical 1br across large swaths of the country, no?
Probably really location dependent, like you said. I could definitely live on that where I live in rural Iowa; the mortgage for my 3 bedroom 2 bathroom house is less than $800 per month.
You're right, we were lucky and bought it toward the end of 2016 with a 3.3% interest rate, right before house values and interest rates started shooting up.
I'm not sure what it's worth today, but we bought it for 90k, so call it 150k? According to a mortgage calculator that I found online, my monthly payment would increase from the $800 I pay now (includes escrow and extra toward the principal) to about $1350 per month with escrow. Definitely a big jump, and I'm not so sure it's doable on that $15/hr minimum wage; it would require my wife to work as well if we want any disposable income after the mortgage, bills and groceries.
I just looked up a nearby property in the bay area listed for almost a million. Estimated payment $6000/month for a cozy 2 bedroom 1000 square foot fixer-upper. Also that area is a 1 hour + commute to where the actual offices are. This is where the tech people are living. Ultimately this is all cross talk. You living wherever you do cheaply does not help me. I think living here needing a living wage probably helps you.
Doesn't the Bay Area have its own unique real estate/housing problem? I don't think that's something a federal minimum wage can or should address. I'm not convinced that I should be able to make $30/hour at any job in Iowa because of real estate prices in California or New York – but I do think people in Iowa should be guaranteed enough to buy their own homes with 40 hours per week.
> This is where the tech people are living.
Just to note, I am a tech person living out here! I run my own software business, and used to work as a dev for local and remote companies before that.
There’s still more to take for the Trump administration. All that free Medicaid, pesky union pay, silly child labor laws, social security etc. are all luxuries the American public doesn’t deserve.
If virtually no one earns $7.25/hr and employers wouldn't dream of offering it, then why not just raise the federal minimum to $12?
If it’s truly irrelevant, then it won’t affect anyone -workers won’t be hurt, and businesses won’t be forced to pay more than they already do. Seems like a win-win, right?
No, because if you pin the minimum wage to wages at full employment, there's no downward flexibility when a recession hits, and you end up with tons of deadweight loss in the labor market.
There's never political will to lower the wage even if economic conditions call for it. There's no benefit to raising the wage now, but there's inevitably a big cost in a few years.
> Nearly 8 in 10 workers earning the minimum wage or less in 2023 were employed in service occupations, mostly in food preparation and serving-related jobs. For many of these workers, tips may supplement the hourly wages received. (See table 4.)
There's a long tail but you can start with 80% of that 1% getting tips in food service.
If they are working full time through the year, they likely aren't spending much time in school and whatever work they are doing should bring in enough money for them to not be homeless, starving, or unable to meet other basic needs like healthcare.
I'd further note that the government and it's taxpayers pay the toll regardless of whether or not we increase the minimum wage. We just end up paying the cost elsewhere in a way that's dollar for dollar a lot less efficient (policing, ER visits, homeless shelters, etc.)
Arguments aside, what do you feel would be an appropriate minimum wage for someone working a job in the US? What factors go into that number? In what situations does that number change?
What was the last job you had that calibrated your pay by asking if you were a dependent? Should someone make less if they are married? Should adult parents be paid less if they live with and are supported by a child? It is irrelevant.
Jobs calibrate pay in the same sense that employees calibrate labour: employers strive to pay the least they can for the most labour; employees strive put in the least labour to get the most wages.
A job which doesn’t offer enough to live on will be less appealing to those trying to live on their own, but fine for high schoolers.
Lets imagine that there is a job with parameters (including wages) where only high schoolers would take the job. Should that job be required to pay above the market wage to make it also attractive to independent adults? Then what job will the highshoolers have? If I've got to pay a full adult wage anyways, I'm probably not going to employ a highschooler.
It creates a deadweight loss. In this example are kids that would benefit from working, at low wages, from both the experience and income and they're left out. There would be useful work done that probably just doesn't get done, creating harms in the form of missing products and services.
Now sure, non-existence of a minimum wage would create other harms and losses so there is a balancing act-- but in the special case of students being discussed here those other costs don't apply. (and that's also why in practice there are minimum wage exceptions like the 'youth minimum wage program').
In my country, with a minimum wage, highschool students work seasonal jobs (including McDonalds) at a decent pay.
They are hired because it's expected they will only work 2 months, and are needed because we have 5-8 weeks of vacation per year and employers can assign 3 of those (usually in summer, when they hire students).
> Lets imagine that there is a job with parameters (including wages) where only high schoolers would take the job. Should that job be required to pay above the market wage to make it also attractive to independent adults? Then what job will the highshoolers have? If I've got to pay a full adult wage anyways, I'm probably not going to employ a highschooler.
> It creates a deadweight loss. In this example are kids that would benefit from working, at low wages, from both the experience and income and they're left out. There would be useful work done that probably just doesn't get done, creating harms in the form of missing products and services.
Why would kids benefit from working? Shouldn't the benefit be from going to school? If they need to supplement their parents income doesn't that just mean that their parents salary is not high enough? It seems the only benefit of allowing kids to work is to the employers, enabling them to depress salaries, because somebody trying to support a family would not take the job. I find it interesting that often the same people (not saying you are) arguing against immigration because the immigrants take away jobs, argue for children to work because it's a "great experience".
> Now sure, non-existence of a minimum wage would create other harms and losses so there is a balancing act-- but in the special case of students being discussed here those other costs don't apply. (and that's also why in practice there are minimum wage exceptions like the 'youth minimum wage program').
This is a bit of a wild way to explain away "we're going to pay people under 18 less because we think we can justify it." Just raise the minimum wage and pay them the same. If they don't take the jobs, they don't. If the jobs go unfilled, raise the pay to a clearing price where they are. If employers can't make the economics work, that's unfortunate.
How you see this issue is likely governed by where on the spectrum between "human" and "labor" you see a person, admittedly. In this context, we're going through contortions to argue to pay people less by age "because we can."
> If employers can't make the economics work, that's unfortunate.
Yes, minimum wages are unfortunate for those who don’t have sufficient skills to work at minimum wage. That’s why there are almost no more human order-takers at fast food restaurants. Kind of sucks for the kids — and poorer folks — who could have worked those jobs and used them as a springboard to something else.
You are stating these things like they are natural or physical laws, when they are simply agreed upon politically and can change. Look no further than California raising the minimum wage to $20/hour for fast food workers, increasing costs roughly ~1.5%. So, let us not say that it can't be done, only that those with the power to change this are unwilling to (for obvious, economic advantageous and exploitation reasons).
You are not addressing my point. The cost to consumers does not consider the cost to potential employees who no longer have jobs. Note the very first comment (at this time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43806765): ‘The fast food chains seem to have a bifurcated response. Some, like McDonalds, seem to have cut crew, while retaining relatively low prices.’
And yes, it is a natural law that increasing the cost of something reduces its usage. That’s why we many governments tax alcohol and cigarettes. Raising the cost of labour means that less of it is bought.
Raising the cost of labour puts labourers out of work.
I'm in California. Two of my favorite fast food restaurants have closed (or closed their locations here) others have radically reduced their workforce and replaced humans with machines.
Have you ever lived in poverty? Have you ever earned minimum wage (or below)? I have and I am extremely grateful for the oppturnities it brought me and the life I was eventually able to make out of it.
There are myriad ways to dehumanize a person. One is saying they should be denied some opportunities they would freely choose to take out of a paternalistic desire to help them. It's a complicated subject, you don't need to justify your position by besmirching the empathy of those who have views you disagree with. Reasonable people can simply disagree!
Yes and yes. It is why I believe there is no room for negotiation and weaseling out of paying humans a wage required that enables them to live with dignity (as it relates to a minimum wage) [1].
Edit:
> There are myriad ways to dehumanize a person. One is saying they should be denied some opportunities they would freely choose to take out of a paternalistic desire to help them. It's a complicated subject, you don't need to justify your position by besmirching the empathy of those who have views you disagree with. Reasonable people can simply disagree!
I don't know what else to tell you my dude. McDonalds made $14B in profit last year. I can show you many examples where the economic resources surely exist based on the profits being made, in whatever industry or vertical you want to pick from, to pay people a living wage. I'm not saying no profits, I'm not cheering on communism. I'm simply arguing for the existing system to pay people enough to survive in comfort, regardless of age, with some combination of decreased profits and increased costs. If I can show you the economic value and wealth exists, and we still go through contortions to argue we cannot pay living wages to people (when the evidence is robust that we can), I can either come to the conclusion that someone has not built a robust mental model on all of the variables in play or they just don't think we should pay people enough to live. We're just arguing unnecessary economic system complexity (living wages for some, lower wages for teenagers even though a majority of minimum wage workers are not teenagers [2]) to paper over exploitation for some combination of consumer excess and shareholder returns. No attempt at dehumanizing is being made.
As a worker being denied the ability to get work I wanted to accept at an agreed wage because someone far away who never met me and doesn't understand my life thought it was too low for my own good isn't particularly dignified.
That's why I'm arguing with your presentation even though I don't oppose having a minimum wage. It's not just a question of lacking empathy for someone or living with dignity, because in those terms a minimum wage can have the opposite effect.
And dismissing contrasting views as unemphatic or suggesting that no one can be poorly paid with dignity detracts from having a useful conversation... it also says little about what the minimum wage should be. Certainly $1m/yr is more dignified than less! :P
High School students do not work full-time, by definition, and so therefore are never going to earn a "living wage" in the sense that that phrase means.
The whole "but kids" argument about minimum wages is a pointless distraction from the actual debate, which is "should there be full-time adult jobs that pay so little that those doing it are living in poverty?".
Personally I think it's obvious that the answer is "no", and any society that answers "yes" needs to take a good long look at itself and what it's actually trying to achieve.
By living with friends or family, state assistance, and/or charity.
How are you supposed to live on 0 wage? Inevitably for some people that's what a minimum wage means: There is some work with some wage less than a minimum for which this person in this place could work, and they can't because of the minimum. Among other considerations any minimum wage has to balance that harm vs the harm for people who would be paid fairly more with a higher minimum wage.
It's also just the case that an extremely small portion of the public makes minimum wage, and since they're exceptional each of their situations are exceptional in its own way.
Why should age matter at all if the person is doing the exact same job? Children already get paid less than minimum wage when there are jobs they legally can't do. The owner of the McDonald's I worked at in high school loved hiring 14 and 15 year olds because he could make them do every single menial job there except cook the food. They were run ragged same as the rest of us for the bonuses only the manager got.
The only response I want to read about this starts with, "Historically, the lurch and jerk of technical progress, paranoia manufactured by ubiquitous media, government financial overreach, and heavy-handed speculative projections shattered the ability of many organizations to establish meaningful turnover and generational handoff ..."
Easily. If the job cannot pay a living wage, it should not exist. We'll get there with structural demographics eventually (pushing up wages as labor supply diminishes as the fertility rate continues to rapidly fall), but it would be nice if we could not make so many people suffer in the interim ("time value of life"). Several states are removing child labor restrictions due to "labor shortages," for example. So, you have to starve the beast of underpaid labor.
We have the means, it's a choice. We could make a better choice, but if we don't, demographics dynamics will make it for us.
I mean, I know it's not a perfect solution. This was just one of those talking points people use to justify keeping the minimum wage low, or eliminating it all together.
These same people will also say "these minimum wage jobs are for people just entering the workforce, not people in their 30s/40s etc."
> How can anyone justify paying a high school kid who works part time most of the year a living wage.
Pretty easily. Once you consider how productive an even below-average worker is in the US, the idea of running a business so poorly that you can’t make bank while paying somebody a living wage seems pretty embarrassing.
While the “teenager” line is often vilified as a sign of unfettered greed (which it is), in my experience it’s been more of the respite of folks with so little business sense that it boggles the mind that they would be an employer.
I personally can’t imagine saying “I am incapable of producing much more than seven dollars per hour with the help of the time, body and mind of a person that I interviewed and selected to work at my business” out loud with a straight face, there are some folks that gleefully proclaim stuff like that as if they’re talking about something other than themselves
High average productivity can just as well come from aggressively not employing anyone that doesn't drive the revenue per head-count forward. I suggest that the below-average workers productivity is inflated by aggressive fat cutting-- and that we'd be better off as a society if we made more room for novice and trainee employees. But this has gone off-topic of the subject of minimum wage because very few people actually receive minimum wage in the US.
> I personally can’t imagine saying “I am incapable of producing much more than seven dollars per hour with the help of the time, body and mind of a person that I interviewed and selected to work at my business”
An inexperienced new employee can easily be a net loss for a long time as they mess up more stuff than they produce while they learn. This isn't tolerated by a lot of modern business philosophy so the jobs and industries that work like this increasingly just don't exist in the US.
> An inexperienced new employee can easily be a net loss for a long time as they mess up more stuff than they produce while they learn.
Yes. It is an employer’s responsibility to train or fire employees that are harmful to the business. If they can’t manage to do that, that’s a failure to operate the business at the most basic level.
Insisting that there exists x or y groups of employees that intrinsically deserve to be paid less than a living wage is tantamount to asserting that an employer or manager is entitled to have their planned failure to operate the business subsidized by that same group that they insist on hiring.
Again, it’s not just greed behind the “[teenagers]* don’t deserve a living wage” spiel. It also tends to expose laziness, lack of imagination, entitlement, an active disdain for work, a lack of grasp on business fundamentals, etc. In other words, a lack of the bare minimum aspects of intellectual capacity and discipline necessary in somebody tasked with employing people
* it is not uncommon to see “teenagers” replaced with all manner of groups that any incompetent manager or employer might foist the responsibility for their failures upon. There is nothing special about them as a group
America is rapidly falling behind its peers. Its been well understood that taking care of your people is the key to prosperity, yet politically we seem to be more worried about ensuring the rich live their lives of leisure at the expense of our working class.
The bare minimum standard we should hold ourselves to is that a 40 hour work week should be able to put a roof over your head and food on your table. The fact that the minimum wage is continuously supressed is absurd.
> The bare minimum standard we should hold ourselves to is that a 40 hour work week should be able to put a roof over your head and food on your table
Absolutely, but it seems to me that as long as companies have A) the option to not hire people and/or B) ways to side-step minimum wage with non-US labor, minimum wage won't achieve that goal for everyone. It will enable the goal for a few and the rest will have a 0 hour work week and a harder time getting any type of job.
But there's the other side of the question - why is a roof over your head and food on your table getting so expensive? That's what needs to be addressed. High rent/housing/food costs prevent cheap labor. There's no point in raising minimum wage to $20/hr if the price of food and rent keeps going up.
Inflation sucks but it is a basic reality. As a request to policy folks out there please consider advocating the minimum wage have some connection to local CPI. A demand for a $xx/hr minimum globally is going to be both too high and too low and irrelevant in a few years time either way. This should not be an issue that needs to be relitigated every 5-10 years just to get back to where we started. The minimum should be set to reflect a basic standard of living in a given locale and not an arbitrary number.
This is obviously good policy, but is effectively impossible because a large contingent of policymakers don't want there to be a minimum wage. In a past era they could trade votes for an $X/hr minimum in exchange for something they wanted, confident that any law they helped pass would be effectively obsolete in a few years anyway, while what they bargained for would live on. A proposal for a scaling minimum wage would never pass. This isn't just a dig at Republicans, by the way, there are plenty of fiscal conservatives among the Dems too.
Shameful, especially here in Wisconsin where the minimum wage is still set to $7.25/hour. And even more shameful the tactics used by gig-companies like Uber and DoorDash to depress their own liabilities, and worker wages, even further down.
"No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country." -- Franklin D. Roosevelt
The pace with which the cost of living is rising is staggering. Heck, I remember the fight for 15 (referring to the campaign to raise the federal minimum wage to $15/h) a decade ago, but I don't see how someone could live on that, $2600/mo pre-tax income, in most of the country these days either. That's like 60%+ of your gross income on rent for a typical 1br across large swaths of the country, no?
> I don't see how someone could live on that, $2600/mo pre-tax income, in most of the country these days either. That's like 60%+ of your gross income on rent for a typical 1br across large swaths of the country, no?
Probably really location dependent, like you said. I could definitely live on that where I live in rural Iowa; the mortgage for my 3 bedroom 2 bathroom house is less than $800 per month.
I assume you bought years ago at a low interest rate - please correct me if I'm wrong.
What do you figure the mortgage would be at today's price and interest rates?
You're right, we were lucky and bought it toward the end of 2016 with a 3.3% interest rate, right before house values and interest rates started shooting up.
I'm not sure what it's worth today, but we bought it for 90k, so call it 150k? According to a mortgage calculator that I found online, my monthly payment would increase from the $800 I pay now (includes escrow and extra toward the principal) to about $1350 per month with escrow. Definitely a big jump, and I'm not so sure it's doable on that $15/hr minimum wage; it would require my wife to work as well if we want any disposable income after the mortgage, bills and groceries.
I just looked up a nearby property in the bay area listed for almost a million. Estimated payment $6000/month for a cozy 2 bedroom 1000 square foot fixer-upper. Also that area is a 1 hour + commute to where the actual offices are. This is where the tech people are living. Ultimately this is all cross talk. You living wherever you do cheaply does not help me. I think living here needing a living wage probably helps you.
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1322-Virginia-St-Berkeley...
Doesn't the Bay Area have its own unique real estate/housing problem? I don't think that's something a federal minimum wage can or should address. I'm not convinced that I should be able to make $30/hour at any job in Iowa because of real estate prices in California or New York – but I do think people in Iowa should be guaranteed enough to buy their own homes with 40 hours per week.
> This is where the tech people are living.
Just to note, I am a tech person living out here! I run my own software business, and used to work as a dev for local and remote companies before that.
The way this usually works out is roommates.
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It already is.
There’s still more to take for the Trump administration. All that free Medicaid, pesky union pay, silly child labor laws, social security etc. are all luxuries the American public doesn’t deserve.
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So, you're saying it's a non issue?
If virtually no one earns $7.25/hr and employers wouldn't dream of offering it, then why not just raise the federal minimum to $12?
If it’s truly irrelevant, then it won’t affect anyone -workers won’t be hurt, and businesses won’t be forced to pay more than they already do. Seems like a win-win, right?
Devil's advocate, but your experiment would be just as effective if they removed the minimum wage too.
No, because if you pin the minimum wage to wages at full employment, there's no downward flexibility when a recession hits, and you end up with tons of deadweight loss in the labor market.
There's never political will to lower the wage even if economic conditions call for it. There's no benefit to raising the wage now, but there's inevitably a big cost in a few years.
> Essentially 100% of those people are making more via tips or under the table
source please
https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2023/
> Nearly 8 in 10 workers earning the minimum wage or less in 2023 were employed in service occupations, mostly in food preparation and serving-related jobs. For many of these workers, tips may supplement the hourly wages received. (See table 4.)
There's a long tail but you can start with 80% of that 1% getting tips in food service.
That's not 80%. Food preparation doesn't get tips. Fast food employees rarely get tips.
Federal minimum wage for tipped workers starts at $2.13/hr. Only if tips aren't at least $5.12 does the employer have to pay more.
No fast food workers are making $7.25.
I'm sorry but if you think that's happening you are utterly disconnected with the real world. Mcdonalds is hiring at $15/hr and not succeeding.
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How can anyone justify paying a high school kid who works part time most of the year a living wage. Not every job is meant to be a “living wage”.
High school kids don't work full time year-round.
If they are working full time through the year, they likely aren't spending much time in school and whatever work they are doing should bring in enough money for them to not be homeless, starving, or unable to meet other basic needs like healthcare.
I'd further note that the government and it's taxpayers pay the toll regardless of whether or not we increase the minimum wage. We just end up paying the cost elsewhere in a way that's dollar for dollar a lot less efficient (policing, ER visits, homeless shelters, etc.)
Arguments aside, what do you feel would be an appropriate minimum wage for someone working a job in the US? What factors go into that number? In what situations does that number change?
How are you supposed to live if your job doesn't pay you a living wage?
The OP is specifically talking about high school students who are supported by their parents.
What was the last job you had that calibrated your pay by asking if you were a dependent? Should someone make less if they are married? Should adult parents be paid less if they live with and are supported by a child? It is irrelevant.
Jobs calibrate pay in the same sense that employees calibrate labour: employers strive to pay the least they can for the most labour; employees strive put in the least labour to get the most wages.
A job which doesn’t offer enough to live on will be less appealing to those trying to live on their own, but fine for high schoolers.
But that’s the republican way. They get to decide based on their values and biases the worth of everyone else.
It's not a question of anyone asking.
Lets imagine that there is a job with parameters (including wages) where only high schoolers would take the job. Should that job be required to pay above the market wage to make it also attractive to independent adults? Then what job will the highshoolers have? If I've got to pay a full adult wage anyways, I'm probably not going to employ a highschooler.
It creates a deadweight loss. In this example are kids that would benefit from working, at low wages, from both the experience and income and they're left out. There would be useful work done that probably just doesn't get done, creating harms in the form of missing products and services.
Now sure, non-existence of a minimum wage would create other harms and losses so there is a balancing act-- but in the special case of students being discussed here those other costs don't apply. (and that's also why in practice there are minimum wage exceptions like the 'youth minimum wage program').
In my country, with a minimum wage, highschool students work seasonal jobs (including McDonalds) at a decent pay.
They are hired because it's expected they will only work 2 months, and are needed because we have 5-8 weeks of vacation per year and employers can assign 3 of those (usually in summer, when they hire students).
> It's not a question of anyone asking.
> Lets imagine that there is a job with parameters (including wages) where only high schoolers would take the job. Should that job be required to pay above the market wage to make it also attractive to independent adults? Then what job will the highshoolers have? If I've got to pay a full adult wage anyways, I'm probably not going to employ a highschooler.
> It creates a deadweight loss. In this example are kids that would benefit from working, at low wages, from both the experience and income and they're left out. There would be useful work done that probably just doesn't get done, creating harms in the form of missing products and services.
Why would kids benefit from working? Shouldn't the benefit be from going to school? If they need to supplement their parents income doesn't that just mean that their parents salary is not high enough? It seems the only benefit of allowing kids to work is to the employers, enabling them to depress salaries, because somebody trying to support a family would not take the job. I find it interesting that often the same people (not saying you are) arguing against immigration because the immigrants take away jobs, argue for children to work because it's a "great experience".
> Now sure, non-existence of a minimum wage would create other harms and losses so there is a balancing act-- but in the special case of students being discussed here those other costs don't apply. (and that's also why in practice there are minimum wage exceptions like the 'youth minimum wage program').
This is a bit of a wild way to explain away "we're going to pay people under 18 less because we think we can justify it." Just raise the minimum wage and pay them the same. If they don't take the jobs, they don't. If the jobs go unfilled, raise the pay to a clearing price where they are. If employers can't make the economics work, that's unfortunate.
How you see this issue is likely governed by where on the spectrum between "human" and "labor" you see a person, admittedly. In this context, we're going through contortions to argue to pay people less by age "because we can."
> If employers can't make the economics work, that's unfortunate.
Yes, minimum wages are unfortunate for those who don’t have sufficient skills to work at minimum wage. That’s why there are almost no more human order-takers at fast food restaurants. Kind of sucks for the kids — and poorer folks — who could have worked those jobs and used them as a springboard to something else.
You are stating these things like they are natural or physical laws, when they are simply agreed upon politically and can change. Look no further than California raising the minimum wage to $20/hour for fast food workers, increasing costs roughly ~1.5%. So, let us not say that it can't be done, only that those with the power to change this are unwilling to (for obvious, economic advantageous and exploitation reasons).
California's $20 fast-food minimum wage improves pay at small cost to consumers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43806608 - April 2025
You are not addressing my point. The cost to consumers does not consider the cost to potential employees who no longer have jobs. Note the very first comment (at this time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43806765): ‘The fast food chains seem to have a bifurcated response. Some, like McDonalds, seem to have cut crew, while retaining relatively low prices.’
And yes, it is a natural law that increasing the cost of something reduces its usage. That’s why we many governments tax alcohol and cigarettes. Raising the cost of labour means that less of it is bought.
Raising the cost of labour puts labourers out of work.
I'm in California. Two of my favorite fast food restaurants have closed (or closed their locations here) others have radically reduced their workforce and replaced humans with machines.
It'll be interesting to see if this effect turns out to be statistically signficant in time. ( https://reason.com/video/2024/12/19/no-californias-20-minimu... ).
Have you ever lived in poverty? Have you ever earned minimum wage (or below)? I have and I am extremely grateful for the oppturnities it brought me and the life I was eventually able to make out of it.
There are myriad ways to dehumanize a person. One is saying they should be denied some opportunities they would freely choose to take out of a paternalistic desire to help them. It's a complicated subject, you don't need to justify your position by besmirching the empathy of those who have views you disagree with. Reasonable people can simply disagree!
Yes and yes. It is why I believe there is no room for negotiation and weaseling out of paying humans a wage required that enables them to live with dignity (as it relates to a minimum wage) [1].
Edit:
> There are myriad ways to dehumanize a person. One is saying they should be denied some opportunities they would freely choose to take out of a paternalistic desire to help them. It's a complicated subject, you don't need to justify your position by besmirching the empathy of those who have views you disagree with. Reasonable people can simply disagree!
I don't know what else to tell you my dude. McDonalds made $14B in profit last year. I can show you many examples where the economic resources surely exist based on the profits being made, in whatever industry or vertical you want to pick from, to pay people a living wage. I'm not saying no profits, I'm not cheering on communism. I'm simply arguing for the existing system to pay people enough to survive in comfort, regardless of age, with some combination of decreased profits and increased costs. If I can show you the economic value and wealth exists, and we still go through contortions to argue we cannot pay living wages to people (when the evidence is robust that we can), I can either come to the conclusion that someone has not built a robust mental model on all of the variables in play or they just don't think we should pay people enough to live. We're just arguing unnecessary economic system complexity (living wages for some, lower wages for teenagers even though a majority of minimum wage workers are not teenagers [2]) to paper over exploitation for some combination of consumer excess and shareholder returns. No attempt at dehumanizing is being made.
[1] https://livingwage.mit.edu/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43840936
As a worker being denied the ability to get work I wanted to accept at an agreed wage because someone far away who never met me and doesn't understand my life thought it was too low for my own good isn't particularly dignified.
That's why I'm arguing with your presentation even though I don't oppose having a minimum wage. It's not just a question of lacking empathy for someone or living with dignity, because in those terms a minimum wage can have the opposite effect.
And dismissing contrasting views as unemphatic or suggesting that no one can be poorly paid with dignity detracts from having a useful conversation... it also says little about what the minimum wage should be. Certainly $1m/yr is more dignified than less! :P
High School students do not work full-time, by definition, and so therefore are never going to earn a "living wage" in the sense that that phrase means.
The whole "but kids" argument about minimum wages is a pointless distraction from the actual debate, which is "should there be full-time adult jobs that pay so little that those doing it are living in poverty?".
Personally I think it's obvious that the answer is "no", and any society that answers "yes" needs to take a good long look at itself and what it's actually trying to achieve.
By living with friends or family, state assistance, and/or charity.
How are you supposed to live on 0 wage? Inevitably for some people that's what a minimum wage means: There is some work with some wage less than a minimum for which this person in this place could work, and they can't because of the minimum. Among other considerations any minimum wage has to balance that harm vs the harm for people who would be paid fairly more with a higher minimum wage.
It's also just the case that an extremely small portion of the public makes minimum wage, and since they're exceptional each of their situations are exceptional in its own way.
Why should age matter at all if the person is doing the exact same job? Children already get paid less than minimum wage when there are jobs they legally can't do. The owner of the McDonald's I worked at in high school loved hiring 14 and 15 year olds because he could make them do every single menial job there except cook the food. They were run ragged same as the rest of us for the bonuses only the manager got.
You mean, how do we further exploit minors?
Send ‘em to the mines and the meat packing plants for $7/hr because they’re only kids!
The only response I want to read about this starts with, "Historically, the lurch and jerk of technical progress, paranoia manufactured by ubiquitous media, government financial overreach, and heavy-handed speculative projections shattered the ability of many organizations to establish meaningful turnover and generational handoff ..."
Most minimum wage workers are not teenagers https://www.epi.org/publication/minimum-wage-workers/
Easily. If the job cannot pay a living wage, it should not exist. We'll get there with structural demographics eventually (pushing up wages as labor supply diminishes as the fertility rate continues to rapidly fall), but it would be nice if we could not make so many people suffer in the interim ("time value of life"). Several states are removing child labor restrictions due to "labor shortages," for example. So, you have to starve the beast of underpaid labor.
We have the means, it's a choice. We could make a better choice, but if we don't, demographics dynamics will make it for us.
https://usafacts.org/articles/minimum-wage-america-how-many-...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
https://joshbersin.com/2023/09/why-we-are-entering-a-secular...
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2020/09/18/the-great-...
https://wallethub.com/edu/states-employers-hiring/101730
https://www.epi.org/publication/child-labor-laws-under-attac...
here we go. Fine. make a law that adults have to be paid a living wage so that this talking point can disappear for good.
I don’t think it’s that easy. Creating multiple classes of workers with different wage floors creates new problems.
It’s also possible that the increased artificial demand for high school labor pushes their average wage to just below the adult minimum wage.
I mean, I know it's not a perfect solution. This was just one of those talking points people use to justify keeping the minimum wage low, or eliminating it all together.
These same people will also say "these minimum wage jobs are for people just entering the workforce, not people in their 30s/40s etc."
> How can anyone justify paying a high school kid who works part time most of the year a living wage.
Pretty easily. Once you consider how productive an even below-average worker is in the US, the idea of running a business so poorly that you can’t make bank while paying somebody a living wage seems pretty embarrassing.
While the “teenager” line is often vilified as a sign of unfettered greed (which it is), in my experience it’s been more of the respite of folks with so little business sense that it boggles the mind that they would be an employer.
I personally can’t imagine saying “I am incapable of producing much more than seven dollars per hour with the help of the time, body and mind of a person that I interviewed and selected to work at my business” out loud with a straight face, there are some folks that gleefully proclaim stuff like that as if they’re talking about something other than themselves
High average productivity can just as well come from aggressively not employing anyone that doesn't drive the revenue per head-count forward. I suggest that the below-average workers productivity is inflated by aggressive fat cutting-- and that we'd be better off as a society if we made more room for novice and trainee employees. But this has gone off-topic of the subject of minimum wage because very few people actually receive minimum wage in the US.
> I personally can’t imagine saying “I am incapable of producing much more than seven dollars per hour with the help of the time, body and mind of a person that I interviewed and selected to work at my business”
An inexperienced new employee can easily be a net loss for a long time as they mess up more stuff than they produce while they learn. This isn't tolerated by a lot of modern business philosophy so the jobs and industries that work like this increasingly just don't exist in the US.
> An inexperienced new employee can easily be a net loss for a long time as they mess up more stuff than they produce while they learn.
Yes. It is an employer’s responsibility to train or fire employees that are harmful to the business. If they can’t manage to do that, that’s a failure to operate the business at the most basic level.
Insisting that there exists x or y groups of employees that intrinsically deserve to be paid less than a living wage is tantamount to asserting that an employer or manager is entitled to have their planned failure to operate the business subsidized by that same group that they insist on hiring.
Again, it’s not just greed behind the “[teenagers]* don’t deserve a living wage” spiel. It also tends to expose laziness, lack of imagination, entitlement, an active disdain for work, a lack of grasp on business fundamentals, etc. In other words, a lack of the bare minimum aspects of intellectual capacity and discipline necessary in somebody tasked with employing people
* it is not uncommon to see “teenagers” replaced with all manner of groups that any incompetent manager or employer might foist the responsibility for their failures upon. There is nothing special about them as a group
I expect you mean requiring a living wage. Or do you really think there are 0 high school kids that are capable of earning more?