This is ridiculous. If I assert that the sky is blue, I don't think I need to provide a list of sources. Under what possible circumstances does the average individual have more negotiating power or more information than a multinational organization with teams of lawyers, an HR department, and access to labour market research?
Edit: To add, when we talk about minimum wage jobs we're usually talking about low-skilled labor. Please explain how a ditch-digger can have negotiating leverage over the average road construction company?
You're assuming a level of competence for corporate HR departments that isn't in evidence. What do you think they have that you can't get from Glassdoor or similar? Not much, if anything.
> Please explain how a ditch-digger can have negotiating leverage over the average road construction company?
By taking a job at some other ditch-digging company, or Walmart, or Uber, or anywhere else, until one company offers a better wage than the other.
For commodity positions it's not even really a negotiation for either party -- everybody on both sides knows what ditch diggers get paid, the employers offer that much and the employees accept that much because anybody who offered less or demanded more wouldn't find any takers.
Which is also why there can't be any meaningful information asymmetry -- when everybody knows the prevailing wage for that category of work, there is nothing else you really need to know in terms of wage negotiations.
I don't think it's a controversial statement at all. Even then, my argument was just in the next sentence.
> Workers don't specifically need a job at that company.
Nor companies specifically need a job filled by a given worker. It's a statement about general needs. If a company finds no satisfying candidates, they can deal with leaving that post open. If a worker doesn't find a satisfying job, they will still take something because they need to eat.
> Even if they need a job, they can go work somewhere else.
Doesn't make a difference if "somewhere else" offers the same low wages. Which is what happens, because most companies have the same incentives and the same lack of limits to push wages below livable levels.
> Even if you want to do this, it still makes minimum wage a ridiculous policy, because it harms the same workers it's purporting to help
The OP linked article shows that there's no clear evidence on whether minimum wages destroy employment or not.
> When there are policies that do only one and not the other (e.g. UBI)
Of course UBI or UGI policies would be far better, and would remove the need for a minimum wage. However, they work in the same direction: give more power to workers to offset the power of negotiation that business have. And, being pragmatic, a minimum wage increase is far more likely to be accepted, at least in the short term, than UBI.
This works in a theoretical perfect competition in an economics textbook. In real life people have financial handcuffs (vesting periods, mandatory option execution/abandonment on job exit), school districts for children, underwater mortgages, 10% gross transaction fees on home sales/purchases.
We're talking about minimum wage jobs. None of that applies.
> school districts for children, underwater mortgages, 10% gross transaction fees on home sales/purchases.
Nobody says you have to move. Take a job from another employer in the same city.
Also, again, minimum wage employees? Typically not homeowners.
The article at hand does a decent job summarizing the different observations people have made.
But that's what I'm saying. Minimum wage is ridiculous because there are alternative policies that don't do the bad thing at all, not even sometimes.
You're just asserting this without any argument or evidence.
> and, most important of all, they can deal with a job opening not being covered most of the time. Workers can't usually live too much without finding a job.
Workers don't specifically need a job at that company. Even if they need a job, they can go work somewhere else. And if that isn't the case, you have bigger problems than minimum wage.
> The only way to counter that push is by giving more power to the worker, and in low-skilled fields with lots of available workers, you need to do that through regulations and subsidies.
Even if you want to do this, it still makes minimum wage a ridiculous policy, because it harms the same workers it's purporting to help. The ones who work for companies that can absorb the cost get more, but the others lose their jobs. When there are policies that do only one and not the other (e.g. UBI), there can be no justification for the one that does the bad thing in exchange for no relative advantage.