I had a discussion with a girl I know about minimum wage (idk what her politics are exactly bc she's inconsistent but if I had to guess I'd say soc dem) and she was saying Biden's plan to increase the minimum wage to $15 by 2025 was the most ambitious plan in world history. She explained that with $15 min wage the US will have the highest minimum wage in the world, this was the best way to do it bc if we switched to $24 min wage overnight then small businesses would completely shut down and leave a large amount of the workforce unemployed and allow corporations like Amazon to take over.
I'll admit I'm newish to leftism and didn't really have an answer to this. Is there an argument from the left against this? also sorry to mods if I posted in the wrong place, wasn't exactly sure where this should go
Nationalize any business that can't keep up is the real answer lol. There's nothing inherently good about "small business", in fact it's fucking exploitation city.
If there's an actual reason for it to exist and it can't be supported while also giving employees a healthy wage, then it needs to be owned publicly.
Small businesses are the hardest and least efficient to nationalise. Even if you go to Cuba or whatever, there's still small businesses.
It depends on the service I'd think. Restaurants and niche stores are what I'm thinking of as things that would be hard to nationalize and the other poster who talked about grant and subsidies seems like a great solution.
Υes, these are things really hard to nationalize. And subsidies could probably help. But at that point, I really think instead of trying to get minimum wage up to 25 or something wild like that, it's a lot better to pressure for it to be raised to something less extreme BUT focus on much better labor laws that give much more power to employees, which is really important in a place like the US where it's impossible to even strike in many places.
Either require entire system changes and people to approach business differently, so I'd like both but maybe not as heavy handedly as described in my original post
They don't require the system to change, they are how you go about gradually starting to make changes to the system. Labor protection laws give to the working class the power to organize against capitalists and neoliberal policy. It is very important.
in addition to this, there's tons of grants issued by the government all the time, as well as subsidies of various sorts for all kinds of industries.
if they wanted to prevent independent businesses from biting the dust it would be easy enough to gradually increase the minimum wage which businesses have to pay employees while subsidizing the difference, in order to provide an actual living wage. they're of course not going to do that, but they could.