Minimum wage = $0.00 per hour.
The value of ANYBODY’S wage is only equal to the amount of increase in value that results from work product. This may be either goods or service, but the only reason anybody is ever hired, is because the person who is adding value to a product or service, has more than he or she can personally handle.
The concept of productivity, that is, increasing the margin of value due to the effort and concentration of the worker over a given period of time, is what drives an actual increase in wages. Automation, which augments, but does not entirely replace the worker, can at times vastly increase this production of goods or services over a given period of time. Fewer workers producing more goods and services, means each worker has justified an increase in hourly wage.
The attitude of the union organizers has been, “If we weren’t here, nothing would get made!” But this has been overturned in recent years with the increased automation of repetitive tasks, which results in far fewer live persons being on the factory floor, and their duties are largely confined to maintaining the smooth function of the machinery, not laboriously handing one part up and placing it on one of a string of identical units passing by a given point.
Because the one person tending the machines is vastly more productive than all the dozens of individuals who are handling only one small part of the overall assembly of the product, the one individual is very well paid. The dozens remain unemployed.
Or at least until they have prepared themselves to be one of the persons tending the machines, or go into one of the service industries that otherwise provide the smooth flow of commerce from the point of production to the point of consumption.
AMEN. That is plain and solid truth.
All we need to do is end the minimum wage. WATCH as some 30 million illegal immigrants no longer assured of a "minimum" wage in America (a wage that is equal to a very good income in the cardboard villages of Mexico) for entry-level jobs where their only compeititon is dumb teenagers. Then get rid of government welfare, health and education entitlements for "minority" illegals, and watch ... NO NEED for more border control or bigger fences. The minimum wage probably contributes more than any other single factor to our huge illegal immigration problem; all the free government services provided by a "compassionate" nation to poor minority illegals is the second biggest factor.
Fences and harsher border control will only deprive more legal Americans of more of their tax dollars, and will solve zip. They didn't cause the illegal immigration problem, and hence won't solve it. Getting rid of the minimum wage would end many evils in the USA.