[quantumBerry]

>we, as a society, have already decided that the benefits of eliminating $5/hour jobs was worth whatever effect it had on unemployment.

We have eliminated some, but others we've simply relegated them to the black market so that those engaging them either do it entirely without unemployment insurance and other labor protections, or they do it as an independent business or contractor. Now a good deal of those jobs are instead taken by illegal immigrants (and I'm not judging these immigrants at all here, just noting what the effects are). What we really "decided" was it was worth making those jobs black market or self employment jobs -- and that is an opinion held by the tyranny of the majority against those who suffer under this regulation.

>With this is mind, it's obvious, that QFC closing two stores is completely meaningless

Somehow I doubt it was meaningless to the individuals who had the choice of move to a store not offering the hazard pay or lose their job. But meaningless from your priveleged perspective of not being immediately affected by the loss.

>I'll just also add that it's very hard not to take what you're saying as simply constructing a straw man (as opposed to misreading or misunderstanding), given how completely unrelated anything you wrote was to my other comment.

Rich from a person leading off with the straw man attacking Cato with the false argument that they had somehow claimed there weren't poor people making minimum wage.

[ravitation]

> We have eliminated some, but others we've simply relegated them to the black market so that those engaging them either do it entirely without unemployment insurance and other labor protections, or they do it as an independent business or contractor.

Do you have any evidence that this occurs at any meaningful scale? This theory, while occasionally toted by conservative/libertarian think tanks, seems to rely on only 1 example (a New York city car wash that was already cutting jobs through automation), which was covered/written by a libertarian think tank.

> Somehow I doubt it was meaningless to the individuals who had the choice of move to a store not offering the hazard pay or lose their job. But meaningless from your privileged perspective of not being immediately affected by the loss.

No, the article you linked is meaningless specifically because it tells you absolutely nothing about those individuals (and also because it's purely anecdotal). When discussing wage increases (or hazard pay in this case), we typically care about the outcomes for workers. Not to mention the fact, as I said, that QFC has a vested interest in blaming regulation.

> Rich from a person leading off with the straw man attacking Cato with the false argument that they had somehow claimed there weren't poor people making minimum wage.

I literally linked the exact quote. They made two arguments, the second of which was that (verbatim) "a lot of people who earn the federal minimum wage or just above it are not poor, or will not be poor in the longer term." The entire point of the original article was that this is not true...

[quantumBerry]

>It's treated as temporary as part of a justification for lower wages. This idea has been explicitly stated by those who oppose a $15 federal minimum wage, arguing that people making current minimum wage, or close to minimum wage, are not actually poor, or won't be in the long-term, because their current wage is temporary (the Cato Institute makes this exact argument and gives the example of "working students").

In particular, note you said that the Cato makes the argument that those making minimum wage are not "actually poor." In fact they make no such claim that there are not poor working a minimum wage job. Yours was a straw man.

>No, the article you linked is meaningless specifically because it tells you absolutely nothing about those individuals (and also because it's purely anecdotal). When discussing wage increases (or hazard pay in this case), we typically care about the outcomes for workers. Not to mention the fact, as I said, that QFC has a vested interest in blaming regulation.

Only if you're oblivious to the fact it tells you exactly what happened to the individuals, which is that they were forced to either lose their job or compete for hours with the established staff at other locations. Were you looking for a theoretical paper? I found a long one with all sorts of mathematical scribble about probalistic black markets and unemployment but I thought it would bore you and the lack of concrete examples wouldn't be terribly interesting nor convincing.

>Do you have any evidence that this occurs at any meaningful scale? This theory, while occasionally toted by conservative/libertarian think tanks, seems to rely on only 1 example (a New York city car wash that was already cutting jobs through automation), which was covered/written by a libertarian think tank.

One example of those who end up engaging in independent contractor / self employment for less than minimum wage is gig workers, who often earn less than minimum wage and yet voluntarily choose to do so anyway [1]. Presumably if jobs numerous enough for the number of people working these gig jobs existed that offered them employment protections, many would choose that over independent contractor status where they are on their own if anything goes wrong.

[1] https://illinoisepi.files.wordpress.com/2021/01/ilepi-pmcr-o...