Supply and demand pushes a market towards an equilibrium state it isn't gravity the market is still made up of human choices. It doesn't constrain you to a specific set of decisions. Don't base your argument on economics if you don't understand economics.
Just because you have chosen to value a labor hour at $11 an hour and a burger at $14.99 doesn't mean its fate. You CAN pay more and you can charge more and because wages aren't most of your labor costs the price doesn't rise linearly with the cost of labor.
This is also complete bubkis
"The #1 driver of low wages in America is essentially illegal migration, which is encouraged by the same people who want higher wages."
Please feel free to back it up.
Millions of managers and CEOs will be ever grateful for that deep insight they couldn't otherwise fathom themselves ... if only they could read HN!
Or maybe we can assume 'They Have Thought of That' and that it's a dynamic already in play. Obviously.
"Supply and demand ... It doesn't constrain you to a specific set of decisions. Don't base your argument on economics if you don't understand economics."
If you understood economics, you would realize they fundamentally constrains your choices. They are literally 'the biggest constraints'.
Small businesses are competitive, and generally keenly aware of what their margins and pricing pressures are. If they could magically create worker stability with a simple price increase -> wage increase function, they'd do it.
Raising prices by 6% across the board is not a solution to anything, it's just inflationary.
FYI California has 3 million illegal aliens [1]. That's about 8% of the population. If you consider that they have no benefits, are slightly younger, they're more likely to be working, that's a 'very solid and probably greater than 12% of the labour market'. Given that they are likely in the lower income bracket, it's probably well more than 20% of working class jobs.
That's a massive proportion and it will fundamentally affect prices for everything.
California's wealth is derived as much from illegal labour practices, paying illegal wages, and illegally not providing worker benefits.
The surpluses go into the pockets of every Californian in the form of cheap prices all the way through the value chain.
A solution could be to work very hard to ensure that every business was ruthlessly enforcing labour standards, wages, conditions and benefits. But that would price those illegal workers out of the market (the only reason they are employed is because they are very inexpensive) and they'd likely have to return home - or be permanent wards of the state. Hence the giant and obvious hypocritical paradox of the California economy.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_immigration_to_the_Uni...
" Don't base your argument on economics if you don't understand economics."
Nobody is interested in you proving that minimum wage is the primary force driving down pay by virtue of you making up the numbers for what portion of the labor force immigrants make up and then concluding since its a really big number of workers it MUST have the effect you describe and then busting out the wikipedia entry on illegal immigration.
This isn't moving the discussion forward.
If you want to avoid a billion businesses paying shitty wages for mostly unnecessarily part time jobs the path forward is simple.
Increase minimum wage and make it a function of total dollars AND hourly. The greater of 600 per week or 15 per hour. Make it expensive to rely on part timers. Meanwhile we can make benefits especially health benefits not the employers problem by rolling out universal health care.
Everyone's costs WILL go up but they will go up evenly and if we end up with a few less Taco bells the world will probably be a better not a worse place.
"companies you could fill those labor hours trivially by making existing staff full time drastically increasing their wages" ?
So the company will 'trivially' have 2x more revenue to be able to offer everyone full time jobs?
While raising prices by 'only 6%' - you understand how Supply and Demand works?
You are the one paying for those services. If you were willing to pay any material amount more, there'd be higher wages.
In addition to Supply and Demand you have 'competitiveness' - service industries run on razor thin margins not by choice (!!), it's the nature of competition.
By having tons of illegal workers, willing to work for less, you guarantee lower wages.
The #1 driver of low wages in America is essentially illegal migration, which is encouraged by the same people who want higher wages.
But all of this is moot: It's immoral (and probably illegal) to collect unemployment benefits if you can be working. In addition, smaller service industry companies cannot afford to pay substantially more, and they will be hit much harder by 'worker subsidies' than Starbucks across the street who will put them out of business.