It's not a matter of getting paid less for the same job, it's a matter of not having the same skills or experience. Employers need some incentive to take a chance on someone with no employment history.
The incentive for taking a chance on an employee should be "I need to hire someone to grow my business so I can make more money".
We should stop worshiping at the alter of "small businesses". We've done it for decades and I'm not convinced it has helped in the slightest. Small business owners have the worst victim complex I have ever seen.
So if there's two candidates, but one of them is a student with no history of employment, and the other is someone with at least a couple years of experience behind their belt, which do you think the business would hire for the same cost?
Let's go back to 2009. Am I hiring for a social media position? Does the experienced person have 2 years of experience in marketing or in social media?
We've all seen this flip before and I think its disingenuous to pretend it doesn't apply here because its "low skill". this leads to us being okay with someone making less than the minimum wage and pushes downward on labor's ability to attempt to make the playing field livable, not level, just livable in a way that we could be proud of as a nation rather than embarrassed of.
Every hire is a chance taken for both sides of the transaction. This argument is tired and can be spun another way: a new employee is a blank slate. The employer will define a working method that cannot be compared and judged based on experience (they have none). The employer may even benefit further from a fresh perspective on working methods.
Let's push it further: can we say the same for very experienced employees? Isn't the employer taking a chance on the employee being willing to learn and adopt a potentially different workflow? Maybe we deduct from the value of a highly experienced employee due to the likelihood of them being stuck in their ways. Oh wait that's ageist now isn't it.. Funny how that double standard works.
But then you're just arguing that we should lower the minimum wage for everyone, because the people with genuinely valuable experience can negotiate higher wages on their own and the people who need someone to take a chance on them for any reason need the ability to offer a discount.
