I have read a lot on Steemit about how minimum wage is a job killer, and have gone through the many postulates people make to have us know that this is true. I will just write a post that I hope will make you think a little about the minimum wage.
My work experience is nearly limited to working for a multinational banana company, now to be fair this company pays a higher minimum wage than the official one, even though after president Zelaya hiked the minmum wage by 40% (this caused his ouster via a coup) the difference between the official and the banana and mining company minimums has declined sharply. 40 years ago the minimum wage of a banana or mining company in Honduras was about 140% more than the official minimum from Lps.3.00 official to 7.20 multinational, now the difference is just a few percentage points..
But this is just a preamble of what I want to talk about, banana companies operate in different countries in Latin America, for example Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia Ecuador and Peru. The minimum wages in each country are all different. I can state as fact that the Costa Rican minimum wage is much higher than that of all the other banana growing countries except maybe Panama, it also has more expensive transportation costs, higher cost for fertilizers and other products used in the farms, taxes are just as high if not higher than in all the other countries, port costs are higher and against Honduras and Guatemala they are at least 30 hours further away from the markets, this means thirty hours more of fuel spent by vessels carrying this fruit making it that much more expensive. And here is the clincher Costa Rican fruit does not sell for a higher price than the fruit from other countries so how can these companies manage the much higher costs?
And yet Costa Rica constantly is a profit center for these companies they always turn out a profit, one of the explanations given is that they don't spend that much on irrigation because it rains a lot in Costa Rica, but I really don't think that off sets costs that much.
I frankly think the real reason for this discrepancy is that all companies can actually pay much more than they do, but the interest of their stock holders are that much more important than the livelihoods of the people who actually produce their product and make it available to consumers.
So I really think all talk about minimum wage destroying jobs is crap, now artificial intelligence, that could destroy more jobs than anything else, but please before posting about how bad the minimum wage is think things through, if things were so bad all companies that have strong unions that demand and receive a lot of benefits for workers would have gone broke a long time ago.