And it's highly disturbing to me that people will defend these situations on this site. An alarming amount of HN commenters seem to believe that the cost of labor is a function of the money created by the labor. In other words, a job will only pay $X/hr because it creates $Y/hr in revenue where Y > X + some margin. They pretend that if Y goes up, then it brings X up and if X is low, then it means Y MUST be low as well. It has nothing to do with the greed of shareholders.
This line of thinking is what leads to managers firing the entire IT team because they don't generate revenue, and then panicking when the email server crashes.
The more logical claim reads more like "employers will logically try not to employ unprofitable labor", meaning that the wage paid to a worker will generally be no higher than the variable profit enabled by that worker.
Yet proponents of raising the minimum wage seem to disregard this truism when it comes to the case of workers who for whatever reason can only create variable profit at a rate between the old and new minimum wage.
These workers can easily be moved from “profitable to employ” to “unprofitable to employ” by the increase in minimum wage, either entirely or by cutting those hours which would become unprofitable.
This line of thinking is what leads to managers firing the entire IT team because they don't generate revenue, and then panicking when the email server crashes.