Take this for what it is worth, but I think that setting a minimum wage is a really bad idea for a number of reasons. I am 59 and own a small business.
When I was 18 I was working at a pizza place while a freshman at college. The minimum wage was 2.65. I had been there for a few months and was already making 3.00. The new minimum wage was set to kick in January 1st 1979. I was working December 31, 1978. Now we probably had 20 people working at our location - I would say 1/2 made the minimum. Either they were new, or they just did enough to get by and had not gotten a raise. When we closed that night, we pulled all the menus down and raised the prices on everything to cover the increased cost. Those of us making more than the minimum did not get any raise. What I realized at that moment all over the country - other businesses were doing the same thing. Even for the people that got a raise .25 cents per hour, that raise was going to disappear as everything you purchased was going to be inflated to cover the cost.
Second - I always hear about a "living wage". You can't feed a family on minimum wage. Well no ****. You are not financially able to support a family on a starter job. You know, you might need to work your way up, find a better paying job and save a little money before you start trying to support a family. I know - what an old out of date way of thinking.
Finally as a small business owner, we have a small snowball business. Most of the cost to run 2 snowball stands is labor. We run an almost 50% labor cost. It is labor intensive and people oddly enough do not want to pay a crap load for flavored ice. It is a nice treat, but they are not going to pay and arm and a leg for it. We give raises for anyone that is a good worker and really good raises for great workers. We employ over 30 people most high school or college students. We can offer them a fun job, a flexible schedule and a fair wage. It is not a huge profit business - we probably clear about twice what a full time worker for us makes in a year. Now, for that magnificent sum My wife works there full time, I have to do all of the books, advertising, pay all of the taxes, sales tax and deal with all of the inspections and red tape. On top of that, we had to invest 50k of our saving to start the business. 15 dollar minimum wage and we would just close the business. No one is going to pay 30 to 40% more for a snowball than we currently charge. If they did, our business would drop off so much we would lose money. Multiply that times the millions of small business across the country.
It hurts the workers - they lose jobs and the most unskilled take the biggest hit, it pushes businesses to more and faster move to automation, it hurts the consumer at large - inflation helps no one and finally it hurts the small business owner.
Amazon just decided to raise their minimum wage to 15. Cool. To do that they pulled all employee performance bonuses, pulled any stock awards. Now the very best worker has no incentive to keep being the best worker. On top of that, Amazon has announced they will work to make sure all companies are forced to follow their lead by having the federal government adopt a 15 minimum wage. That is a great way to kill your smaller less well positioned competition. Amazon can afford to add more robots much easier than a lot of smaller companies which they compete with.
There is no such thing as a free lunch. You can't wave a magic wand and make unskilled labor all of a sudden worth 30k a year. It sounds great. I can't imagine anything good coming from it.
I wish you guys all the best.
Charles