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Comment by n3xyf | Hacker News Reader

The first thousand USD/mo a person earns has a different meaning to them than the second thousand, and the third thousand, and so on with diminishing returns. The point of minimum wage should be that no one is constantly fighting for their life, because a person in that situation is usually a harm to everyone.

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The point of minimum wage should be that people can only be exploited to a certain level by their circumstances and requirement for food and shelter.

There is of course still a black market

Compensation for work comes in the forms of money, working environment, flexibility, etc.

A minimum wage is a ban on certain baskets of compensation for work.

It doesn't prevent 'exploitation', whatever that means. Companies fiercely competing for labour is what you want here.

>A minimum wage is a ban on certain baskets of compensation for work

No, it's not.

That's literally how a minimum wage works legally: you can have the nicest work environment and biggest flexibility and awesome training (or not), but if the money part of the job is below some minimum, the job is banned.

Maybe try working one. Minimum wage jobs literally have among the worst working environments.

I would have to move countries to do that. There's no minimum wage where I live.

In the gastro industry it’s extremely common (at least in my country) to be employed illegally (as in cash in hand directly).

Most restaurants you go to to eat would have to close if they needed to employ their workers legally. Same thing applies to bars and similar venues.

Source: worked in that industry 10+ years

> Most restaurants you go to to eat would have to close if they needed to employ their workers legally.

And then there would be much more demand for restaurants, then there is supply, causing the prices to rise until they could afford to pay the workers legally.

Granted. But that means that there are negative effects to at least some hikes of the minimum wage. So now the discussion can be had about what the effects are and when which effects kick in and how much.

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