One interesting corollary of minimum wage that I don’t hear much about is something you might call the “minimum job”. In other words, I might pay someone $1 to do some menial ancillary task, but the cash register is really what needs to be done. If minimum wage is raised, I can either pay more for the same tasks or decide they’re not worth doing at all.
Where this really hits home is trash. So many US cities just have litter everywhere, even in well-trafficked areas. One solution is an army of people to clean up the garbage.
What matters more than the minimum wage amount is the cost of living overall. This is something CA is finding out the hard way. You can raise minimum wage to $30 an hour, even with regular hours (usually minimum wage restaurant workers have different hours every day) it won’t make housing affordable in the Bay Area. On the flip side if real estate is cheap it means rent is cheap for workers (willing to accept lower wages) and businesses (willing to hire more).
Elevating the minimum job in theory forces productivity upward, so for your trash example, the job still must be done with more special equipment so the same labor used is reduced (since it now costs more). Land value taxes do something similar in forcing a certain level of productive land use to cover yearly taxes. The idea is that over time people and resources should be used more efficiently, and there should be some pressure from society in that regard.
An HCOL city provides a different kind of pressure (you need to make more money to live comfortably in one), while a LCOL provides some opportunity to explore and experiment with less risk (since rent is cheaper, starving artists can survive).
Where this really hits home is trash. So many US cities just have litter everywhere, even in well-trafficked areas. One solution is an army of people to clean up the garbage.
What matters more than the minimum wage amount is the cost of living overall. This is something CA is finding out the hard way. You can raise minimum wage to $30 an hour, even with regular hours (usually minimum wage restaurant workers have different hours every day) it won’t make housing affordable in the Bay Area. On the flip side if real estate is cheap it means rent is cheap for workers (willing to accept lower wages) and businesses (willing to hire more).