@jpsb So we can put you down for the $15 minimum wage campaign then?
That's a ridiculous argument because you can always get somebody to do a job if you raise the pay high enough. Raise the pay for septic tank cleaner high enough and even the likes of Bill Gates and Trump would happily do the job. So what? That will never happen because cleaning septic tanks cannot support the costs needed to pay such a wage.
Wages in nonunion industries are set by supply/demand and weighted by value-add. Nobody is going to pay $15/hour for a job where the value-add is less than $15 (plus the other expenses the employer incurs with respect to the position). The fact is that the value-add from most low-end jobs is low enough that most legal Americans, of whatever stripe, won't do them. Why? Who knows; that's a personal subjective decision, but it is clearly influenced by the snowflake entitlement mentality many Americans have developed.
The fact is, if you really wanted to stop illegal aliens from undercutting Americans - I'm sure it happens to a degree - you would grant illegals guest worker status and make sure their employers are paying at least current minimum wage, plus required benefits, and all payroll taxes. Making current illegals guest workers means they can no longer be treated like indentured servants by those who currently employ them because they will stand up for themselves without fear of deportation. On the macro scale that will necessarily make hiring current illegals an undesirable proposition for many current employers because they would then cost the employer just as much as an American would cost. If two people cost the same but one speaks English and the other only Spanish, guess who gets hired.
Most anti-immigrants display a foolish consistency that is worthy of Emerson's hobgoblin.
There is a formula we used to use a long time ago when I was working on my MBA that was a pretty accurate way of calculating what the market could support as a wage.
It involved taking the net value of the transactions per hour performed by the worker, multiply it by the number of jobs the worker is responsible for (if just himself with no subordinates, multiply by one), and divide by a specific factor.
For example, someone at a register at McDonalds may complete 10, $5 transactions per hour and is just responsible for his own job. Once it was factored in, his job may only have a market value of around $5-6/hour.
A CEO, on average, may deal with hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour and have under his responsibility, tens of thousands of employees.
It was a bit more complicated than this but it gives you the idea. I need to go dig that up. It is very eye opening.
