Minimum-Wage Blowback
Well, at $3/hour, there is no minimum wage that is going to keep that robot from coming.
There are some good minimum wage studies from places where they have raised the minimum wage and you can make direct comparisons across city and state lines. Generally speaking, raising the minimum wage has generally not cost jobs. Some research shows that it does.
So at one end is the CBO study that says that raising the minimum wage to $15 across the US would result in 1.3 million jobs lost AND 1.3 million people raised out of poverty. I'll leave it to you to decide whether or not that's a good thing, but I feel that people who work full-time should not be living in poverty, especially not given the gains that have gone to the top 10% over the last 40 years.
Other research shows much smaller job loss and if you look at what has actually happened, results have been mixed. Unemployment in NY rose slightly while in SFO it did not. Some research has adjusted these numbers for what happened in neighboring cities and states to isolate the effects of raising the minimum wage and has shown that job loss from raising the minimum wage is less than predicted in simple models, because low-income people spend their money locally, whereas when the gains go to high-income people, as they have since the 1970s, they put that money into investments and such that do not benefit the local economy.
https://psmag.com/news/what-the-research-says-about-a-15-minimum-wagehttps://www.epi.org/publication/minimum-wage-testimony-feb-2019/https://www.marketwatch.com/story/15-minimum-wage-reduces-poverty-doesnt-cut-jobs-berkeley-study-says-2019-07-08There may or may not be some job loss due to raising the wages of the lowest-paid workers, but what's the point of full-time jobs that pay for nothing except living at home with your parents on their health insurance and eating their food?
Over half of fast food workers are over 21. Many live in poverty.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/fast-food-jobs-real_n_6028404Minimum wage kept pace with productivity from 1945 to 1970, at which point they became decoupled and productivity gains accrued to the wealthy rather than to everyone. If minimum wage had remained coupled to productivity gains, it would now be over $20 per hour. If it had merely tracked with inflation, it would be $11.58.
I worked plenty of minimum wage jobs early on, but it was a different world. Much minimum-wage work is now better done by a robot. With the rise of Just In Time Scheduling and intense surveillance, most minimum-wage jobs are far, far worse than the ones that I had 30 or 40 years ago.
Compared to a minimum-wage worker of today, I not only had 38% higher pay, I also had a more steady schedule, more hours per week, the ability to do multiple things (school and work or multiple jobs) because of the steadier scheduling.
Honestly, I say that if the best we can do for people are jobs that have erratic schedules where people are essentially on-call every day so they can't combine multiple jobs, get short shifts, are scheduled to stay below 29 hours per week to keep them from qualifying for benefits, are paid $7.25/hour, we are better off as a society if those jobs just go away and we find other ways to help those people live.
As it is now, our entire welfare system - food stamps, Medicaid, etc - is basically one big subsidy to the fast food industry.
