There's been, and still is, a lot of talking and arguing and screaming, and even a bit of throwing things at people, around the topic of minimum wage, and whether it's good or bad and should it be higher or lower or even exist at all.
For many people, it's a very emotive subject. It ties in very closely to home and family and survival, because it can directly affect a person's ability to keep and/or take care of those very important things.
But that's not the point of this post, the point of this post is, how does it hurt the low wage earners? At first glance, it seems that earning more money can only help those at the low end of the income scale.
Truthfully, minimum wages are merely the carrot at the end of the stick. It urges us forward, but in the end, we never catch the carrot. In this case, the carrot is a sustainable wage that allows people to maintain a decent standard of living.
Minimum wage is simply a tool that is used to urge the loyal steeds of the electorate ever forward, in order to keep them giving their time and energy into a system that has been constantly rigged to move money from the poor to the powerful and wealthy. And, ultimately, it ends up hurting the low wage earners infinitely more in the long term. It does this by removing entry level jobs from the market. No one wants to pay a checkout bagger the same wage as a shift manager, after all.
And, in fact, the shift managers wouldn't want to do their job if they could get the same pay for the much easier task of putting groceries into bags. Forcing stores to pay them a higher wage forces them to raise the wages of everyone in the store, in order to keep experienced employees who bring more value to the company. In order to offset this, however, they often have to consolidate positions(i.e. combine the work of two separate jobs into a single position), or eliminate them entirely(like with self checkout lines).
So, minimum wage helps give the appearance of helping low wage earners, but in the end, it makes it harder for them to find jobs in the first place. And the crazy thing is that, often, when someone's job is eliminated due to increases in the minimum wage, they often blame the employers for being 'cheap'.
Of course, many people will disagree with this, but disagree all you want. It won't change the reality of numbers and business opportunity. If you want to show compassion to the poor, if you want them to have opportunities to provide for and improve the circumstances of themselves and their families, stop regulating their jobs. Stop telling them they have to get this license and that degree and a business permit. And definitely stop telling them they can't hire people willing to work for less than whatever arbitrary amount has been decided as the 'minimum'. Simply stop making it illegal for poor people to start their own business. Barriers to entry into markets are what keeps poor people poor, not the failure to point a gun at the heads of their employers until they have to either fire them or go out of business.