Can you think of one factory worker who’s paid minimum wage?
I’ll admit with the puny recovery, many jobs (that persons in their prime earning years are finding, if they’re even in the work force) aren’t exactly paying 5-star wages.
If it’s the flood of low skilled labor driving down wages, how is voluntarily paying more in wages going to put the American worker at an advantage? I think the EEOC would have a problem if companies set wages based on ethnicity.
Raising the minimum wage simply keeps all low-skilled labor out of the workforce, including Americans with low skills.
Food processing factory workers are paid minimum wage — or less. That type of work used to pay more — but job gang wranglers now supply all the foreign labor the factories need for less. And those workers are competing against Americans illegally — or used to be, when we had a border.
Why are we insisting that only certain Americans — the lowest skilled among us — have to work for what laborers in central Mexico are paid?
If we still had a border, I would be one percent against the minimum wage, because I believe that a free labor market sets wages exactly where they should be.
But that’s hypothetical. There’s no free labor market, because there’s no border. There’s a flood of foreign labor, unleashed on the lowest skilled American workers by their own government. They deserve help from the rest of us, whose jobs aren’t threatened by foreigners.
And to your point about the EEOC — the minimum wage doesn’t put the American at an advantage for hiring purposes. But if there is a minimum wage, an American worker is more likely to take that job. He won’t as long as it pays as if this were central Mexico. And he shouldn’t have to take that wage and shut up about it in his own country.