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The Center for American Progress reports:
Think a higher minimum wage is a job killer? Think again: The states that raised their minimum wages on January 1 have seen higher employment growth since then than the states that kept theirs at the same rate.
The minimum wage went up in 13 states Arizona, Connecticut, Colorado, Florida, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington either thanks to automatic increases in line with inflation or new legislation, as Ben Wolcott reports in his analysis at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. The average change in employment for those states over the first five months of the year as compared with the last five of 2013 is 0.99 percent, while the average for all remaining states is 0.68 percent.
Digging deeper, all but one of those states are experiencing increases in employment, and nine of them have seen growth above the median rate.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 04 2014, @05:47PM
> because they've been replaced with machines, then there are fewer people with money to buy things from those machines. This is most likely the reason it hasn't been done.
What? You honestly think that businesses which rely on minimum-wage customers aren't trying to cut costs by automation in order to preserve their customer base's financial health? Maybe you don't live in the USA and haven't noticed all the stores replacing cashiers with automated checkouts? Ralphs (or maybe it was Vons they are indstinguishable) has only robot checkouts after 10pm in california. Walmart runs their robo-checkers 24-7. Home depot has been physically reducing the number of human operated checkout-lanes and filling the floor space with more product displays.
Of course businesses are automating as much as they can, they don't give a damn about where their customers get their money from, that's waaaay too disconnected from them to worry about.