Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by danans 2262 days ago
> it was mandated for everyone, for the purpose of rendering those with lower-paying jobs (people of color, immigrants) unemployed

So it was mandated for "everyone", but by your own description, not really, because it adjusted another variable - who had a job - by race, which is practically the same thing as being racially exclusionary.

This is not so different to how black people in theory got the right to vote after the Civil War, but practically were excluded from voting in many areas until just 50 years ago.
1 comments
AndrewUnmuted 2262 days ago
No, it is very different from that. The right to vote in that case was denied purely based upon racial boundaries - it's not like poor white people couldn't vote in the South.

Minimum wage is much more underhanded than that, because it was passed in the name of fairness but it was really just to protect entrenched workers against an incoming wave of competition.

These labor protections in the US are what initially got so many working-class white Americans on board with the progressive agenda in the first place.

link
danans 2261 days ago
> Minimum wage is much more underhanded than that, because it was passed in the name of fairness but it was really just to protect entrenched workers against an incoming wave of competition.

was much more underhanded, not is.

Who cares how it started? Again, many rights we have today started out either explicitly or implicitly limited by race.

Today, the minimum wage is very much about fairness to low wage workers of any race, but especially low income people of color, who are over-represented at the bottom end of the income ladder.

If you arguing against that, you'd be arguing that today's progressive movement is secretly about preserving jobs only for white people, which would be extremely far fetched. It seems more like you are trying to foist the racist rationale for minimum wage from yesteryear upon the far more equitable purpose it serves today, in an perhaps underhanded attempt to discredit today's version.

If you're going to argue against today's minimum wage, you should use arguments relevant to today, i.e. the usual ones you hear from its opponents about how it will bankrupt businesses, and rob the poor of the incentive to pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

link