[harryh]

The current US unemployment rate is 3.5% which is near all time historical lows.

Virtually no one is unemployed in the US because of the combination of international trade and minimum wage laws.

[tomatotomato37]

That's because most vulnerable workers are either skirting labor laws through the gig economy or have given up and dropped out of the labor pool altogether, which means for whatever reason they don't get counted in the unemployment rate

[harryh]

To whatever extent that is happening, there is no evidence that it has happening more today than it was happening 50 years ago (before globalization) so comparing the unemployment rate of today to the unemployment rate then is still a perfectly valid comparison.

[methodover]

There are more ways to measure the health of the American worker than the BLS' unemployment rate. What about other statistics? Things like like...

- Wage growth over time - Health outcomes - Savings rate - Credit card debt rate - Feelings about the future (are we on the right track/wrong track?)

[harryh]

OPs comment asserted that developed world workers were being hurt specifically because of the combination of free trade and a minimum wage caused unemployment. My comment was refuting that specific argument.

The stats you mention are interesting but not relevant to OPs assertion that a wage floor in developed nations was problematic in a free trade world.