If a restaurant can afford to pay its entire staff 15/hr, but then why doesn't the restaurant pay those wages? That's the value that the humans in that restaurant are producing.
I feel like we're talking past each other here. Many restaurants CANNOT afford to pay their entire staff the greater of $15/hour or whatever those same staff members could get working other jobs. Many of the restaurants (and other small businesses) only break even because the owners and their families are working 60-80 hour weeks without pay.
I'm not trying to equate human value to economic output; I'm saying that a person's market value and productive value are way out of line.
Okay, you are right that is a different discussion.
On what data do you base your conclusion that for folks making between $7.25/hour and $15/hour are creating enough economic productivity that their employers could afford to pay all of them $15/hour without losing money?
If you look at American industry as a whole today, corporate profits are indeed vast. The problem with trying to use a minimum wage hike to shift more of those profits back to worker compensation is that an awful lot of those profits are earned by tech companies like Google or Apple or Microsoft which have very few workers earning between $14,000-30,000/year ($7-15/hour). The low wage employees those companies do have (for example the Apple Genius Bar workers) are in parts of the company that are particularly vulnerable to automation.
Almost half of all retail workers in the USA will likely be displaced by automation in the next ten years even if wages remain constant. While big businesses tend to generate a lot of profit often with increasingly small numbers of (relatively) highly paid employees, small businesses often run on much tighter margins and employ a disproportionate share of low wage workers.
Approximately half of all minimum wage workers work at businesses with less than 100 employees and 40% at businesses with less than 50. Think a family owned hardware or grocery store. These businesses are, in turn, disproportionately operating in the retail space where profit margins are slim to begin with (3-5% for restaurants 1-3% for grocery stores), and competition from online retailers who don't employ nearly as many people are shrinking their revenue and margins even more.
TL;DR: While it is true that in the US today many people make less than $15/hour and companies are making vast corporate profits, most of the people making minimum wage aren't working for the the companies making those vast profits, and most employees at those super profitable companies aren't making less than $15/hour.
Look at Uber where people who are bad at math basically make less than minimum wage and line the pockets of Uber executives. Far be it from me to say that Uber is appropriately paying their drivers.
Uber is a great example. It's a company that is losing billions of dollars per year. (Well 1.8B in 2018, I'm rounding 1.8 up to billions with an "s"). Telling Uber it's only allowed to have drivers if it pays them more is certainly something we could do. But Uber isn't going to be subsidized by investment money forever. And it isn't going to survive losing money on every ride.
Now Uber could certainly raise their prices to both turn a profit on each ride AND pay their drivers more. But raising prices would reduce how often people called for a Uber ride, reducing the total number of drivers the company would need.
So the choice we'd be making there, as a society, is whether we'd rather have more lower paid Uber drivers, or fewer higher paid Uber drivers. That's basically a microcosm of the whole challenge we face with the labor market generally.
If machines replaced 20% of the work force, I don't think the rich should then get to pay minimum wage for their own personal jesters just because everyone poor enough would be willing to do it. It's demeaning and shameful that people think extracting human value for their own personal gain at the expense of that human's ability to pay for medical care, housing, and healthy food is just the way Capitalism works. There is a better way to organize our society. Much better that treats humanity with a bit more equity.
I agree! Let's establish a safety net that means no one has to choose between going without medical care, housing, or healthy food or taking a demeaning job (whether at $12/hour or $15/hour) that adds very little of value to society (e.g. personal jester to someone random guy who was an early investor in facebook). People will do almost anything when they're worried about losing their home or not being able to feed their children, but we shouldn't be putting people in a situation whether those are their only alternatives.
While we're at it, let's also makes sure that the people who don't even have the option of working as a personal jester* also have their fundamental needs met.
Let's do it by taxing corporate profits, which puts the burden of providing that safety net on proportionally the companies that make the most corporate profits (Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc), instead of a system that harms the vast number of people making low wages at small companies that make much less profit.
I will point out that your underlined sentence seems a lot more like a discussion human value than economic output. (And I agree, human beings have a lot of value and importance in the world. It's just not always tied to our economic output.)
*Because when it boils down, if we're counting on rich people hiring americans put out of work by robots to do menial and degrading jobs, there just aren't that many rich people relative to the number of folks at risk of being put out of work by automation (with or without a minimum wage hike).
