Although this post was half the forum thread ago by now, I feel like a major element of this argument got swept under the rug.

I remember the first talk about raising the minimum wage all the way to $15 from - gasp! - $7.15 or whatever it was. This was one of the main arguments against it, along with "businesses won't be able to stay afloat paying this much in wages" as well as arguments that the minimum-wage jobs are NOT WORTH $15/hour.

And I'm quite certain those arguments are from people still living 30 years in the past and completely out of touch with the current value of the dollar.

Minimum wage, applied to bare minimum entry level jobs, exists for a basic purpose. To ensure that an employee spending their whole day working for an employer is, at MINIMUM (not quite a pun but certainly intended), able to afford to be a functioning human being, living under a roof. And for this reason, minimum wage is supposed to increase with inflation. You know, so that your entry level job, which pays the bare minimum that you need to be a functioning human being in society, is able to fund your food and rent, regardless of the current market price that everyone is paying for a loaf of bread.

Except, that's not what happened. Those complaining that YOU SHOULD NOT BE MAKING $15/hr FLIPPING MY BURGERS haven't been noticing that while the normal forces of inflation have steadily brought up the dollar amounts required to live a minimal life, minimum wage stopped being updated since at least the 1990s. So for over two decades now we've been learning to associate the $7-8 minimum wage as what an entry level worker should be making. All the while, the cost of living has drifted ever higher, so that those eight dollars can no longer support a single independent person anymore. Sure, it's not a problem for those living with parents or rooming with friends, but not everyone has that luxury. Do you think that person dutifully flipping the burgers you love to eat should be spending their free time living on the street, just because *most* of the other minimum wage workers have a place to stay rent-free?

The argument that "the owners cant pay the other staff more to balance it out"...? To the business, I say that's a you problem. Are you actually telling me that your waitstaff's work is so worthless to you that despite the fact that they work forty hours a week, they don't even deserve enough money to keep them out of a cardboard box under a bridge? If paying your employees the bare minimum they need to function in society is going to put your business under, then you need to rethink your business operations.

Oh, and the cook needs a raise. If the quality of his work is really 75% more valuable than your busboy, then the busboy should be making $15 (what minimum wage should have reached at this point, if not more) and the cook should be making $26. If you as an employer can't afford that, then maybe you shouldn't be promising - to borrow a saying from a certain infamous thread - a Ferrari at Kia prices.

Most of my argument was directed more at those who actually don't understand inflation (which many of the anti-increase-minimum-wage crowd seem to struggle with), but regardless, I'm glad you are indeed on the same page there.

I think what may have thrown off my initial impression of your post was "minimum wage jobs were not designed to be career jobs" from the first paragraph, which is something I usually see floated as an argument against raising minimum wage at all. In context, I can see the validity in your statements. And yes, bringing up non-entry-level pay at the same time as entry-level pay is something that should be done but is too often overlooked.

That's also a good point that isn't brought up enough in comparisons with standards of living from past decades. There are quite a few things we now depend on to be productive that simply weren't a part of life back then. At one point I was told that one typically gets a job by bringing a resume to a prospective employer. Then I tried looking for a good job myself - only to have printed resumes and requests for paper applications largely ignored if not outright turned away, with companies telling me they only take applications online. If I'd been living on my own and earning a bare minimum living wage for 1940s standards, I probably wouldn't have had the personal budget for an internet connection with which to do so.

Sure, libraries usually have free internet, but in order to accept a job offer, I also need a phone line... Thus you can add the cost of an internet subscription and a personal phone to the modern-day bare minimum essentials - and all the lovely headaches those services come with.

There are a couple of ways I can interpret this question, so I'll address it in a couple of ways too.

A part-time job probably (??) shouldn't need to pay as much in a week as a full-time job, since the person is spending less time working for the company. I suppose you could make the point that a part-time worker could be trying to balance school in their off hours or having health issues preventing them from being able to work full time, but I think that's an issue of unemployment coverage rather than an employer's responsibility.

That said, not working full time isn't an excuse for the employee to be paid less than (the idealized) minimum wage per hour that they do work. If the employee only works 20 hours a week, their paycheck ought to be roughly half that of another employee who does the same job 40 hours per week. Aside from situations like I mentioned above, if this person needs to support themselves independently, they could take up the other 20 hours per week on a second job, since they literally do have time.