opebo was right about a $15/hour minimum wage

[Famous Mortimer]

I support raising the minimum wage but I am legitimately concerned about what will happen to current minimum wage workers when it happens. Look at the much publicized case of Denmark where McDonald's workers make $15 an hour. Most of those workers are native born college graduates without children. Obviously that's not the case in America. The reason that McDonald's in America hires immigrants and single moms on welfare isn't because those workers are great, it's because those are the only people desperate enough to work for less than 8 dollars an hour. If you raise the minimum wage to 10 or 15 dollars an hour, management will likely decide to get their money's worth and start hiring people who can speak English and show up to work on time, ie childfree college educated liberal arts majors.

So what happens to the current employees? Some of the immigrants might opt to leave the country. Many will stay though and the native born unemployables won't have anywhere to go at all. What do they do? There's really no answer besides a guaranteed minimum income and that's not politically realistic.

[ingemann]

No most employees at Danish McDonalds are not college graduates, they're high school or college part timers like most low status service jobs with customer contact.