By and large those who oppose it are not evil for the sake of evil but concerned that the alternative is not a higher minimum wage but no wage at all as workers in unskilled jobs are replaced by self-service or automation. McDonalds is already doing it. The answer is using technology as a lever to help people do higher-value-adding work and incentivising people to upskill into those jobs after a brief period at entry level. Not raising the level of entry level so high that it pulls the ladder up.

I say this as someone who started working before the minimum wage even existed, at a fraction of what it was when it was introduced.

I don't believe raising rates will have the damning effect of pushing automation where it is already not going.

A few years ago I saw my first self grocery checkout and the self ordering machine at a&w or the machine to buy tickets at a movie theatre. These things were coming before and shouldn't be part of the discussion where we assign it as the outcome of the wage increase.

The people who complain about it seem to be owners who just complain because complaining is free and any they are against increase whatsoever: http://www.workingwa.org/sky-aloft/2015/tom-douglas

We have the situation in the UK where people on minimum wage get top-ups via the welfare system which makes no sense, I'd like to see an increase sufficient to negate that, because it's just taxpayers subsidising businesses! But £15/hr for unskilled work can't be justified. £9-10/hr is probably about right.

> The answer is using technology as a lever to help people do higher-value-adding work and incentivising people to upskill into those jobs after a brief period at entry level.

Ideally this would happen, but those jobs just aren't opening up for most of the country. Socioeconomic mobility is on the decline[1], and like I showed already, the lower class is growing considerably. The ladder is already being pulled up & automation (and outsourcing) is already occurring, regardless of the current minimum wage.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_mobility_in_the_...

For a start I say we stop referring to people as lower class, middle class, upper class. It sounds like something out of a 19th century Dickens novel.

Why? And how else would you describe the economic strata that exist in our economy and every other economy in the world?

People are people. We have a classless society in the U.S.. It would be far more correct to refer to differences in income, rather than using the word "class".

Class is an indicator of power, which in our capitalistic society, is largely determined by income or wealth. Using the terms "lower, middle, upper class" mostly does speak of differences in income[1], though the upper class is mostly determined by wealth and a return on capital instead of labor.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_class_in_the_United_Sta...