It depends on the job and place. In large cities with high costs of living, no-skilled workers absolutely do deserve $15/hour. And with the way inflation is working lately, we need to start paying people $15/hour because why the fuck should anyone work for $8/hour when $8/hour is now well under minimum wage?
If the cost of living is too high for the wages of the city you're in,
fucking leave.
Why exactly is the price of living in a city higher than anywhere else? How can that be justified?
Higher density means less transit, fewer stores per good sold, shared utilities and common spaces, smaller living spaces, streamlined structures of power and communication, these are all things that should (and do) cut costs of living. Indeed, living in a city did have a dramatically lower cost of living in the 1800s and most of the 1900s than living well in the countryside or in a town. That's right: being a shitty city gremlin was once upon a time
cheaper than owning a multi-acre ranch estate, or even a half acre of suburban housing.
That shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, it's common sense, but it defies the artificial common sense that cities
must be expensive that has been invented in more recent years to justify administrative waste, corruption, bad city planning, and other assorted systematic cash harvesting operations.
Minimum wage is itself the latest on a very long list of "solutions" to "real" "problems" invented to use as a bludgeon against the competitive advantage of escaping cities. A worthy successor to other past successes like invasive environmentalism and the wave of globalized industry that resulted from it. No coincidence at all these policies are ultimately responsible for the supply chain crisis discussed in this thread. The root of the policies are after all
irresponsible, death throes, conniving resuscitation attempts for a way of living that has clearly outlived its tangible advantages.
The perfect irony of any talk of minimum wage in cities at all is that most businesses
beat the $15 minimum wage line for no-skill services in cities, and it's the high-skill positions that are paying too little for city life. This is usually because high-skill positions offer zero competitive advantage for existing in an urban space, while service jobs earn dramatically more revenue in cities due to density. Look forward to the efforts to ban or tax to death "working from home" until it'd be cheaper to have a Manhattan office, by the way.
Well, if this is the case, and minimum wage doesn't really address the problem, why is it even a topic on the table? Could it really be about the thousands of stores that would have to shutter in rural areas to reduce store density because $15/hr/employee couldn't possibly sustain all the ones currently open?
There's also an obvious benefactor to the collapse of suburban and rural stores, Amazon, whose regular funding and lobbying for minimum wage hikes is a very much related but not quite identical conversation.
Don't fall for it.
