St. Louis will drop minimum wage from $10 to $7.70.

[sundin13]

Razeak said:

VGPolyglot said:
I see a lot of people say how there'll be businesses that go bust if they have to pay their workers a higher wage, but the question is, is that really a bad thing? I'm sure there were businesses that relied on slavery that went bust too once it was abolished, should we have kept slavery legal to ensure that didn't happen?

The employees have a choice of other employment or entitlements. They aren't slaves. The comparison doesn't work because no force is used against them and no one owns them.

In a time when people looking for jobs outnumber the amount of available jobs, the force that motivates people is the fact that menial wages are better than no wages. For a system without minimum wage to work, there needs to be a surplus of jobs which have to compete for laborers to drive wages upwards. Otherwise, the forces of supply and demand drive wages downwards until you find the person who is willing to work for the least amount of money. 

That doesn't mean that higher minimum wage is better, it means that a middle ground should be reached which provides reasonable wages leading to reasonable costs for companies. Going too far on either end is potentially damaging.