Talk:Minimum wage

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Minimum wage was a good articles nominee, but did not meet the good article criteria at the time. There may be suggestions below for improving the article. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
July 10, 2006	Good article nominee	Not listed
September 23, 2011	Peer review	Reviewed

Current status: Former good article nominee

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Minimum Wages Table

@Avatar317 I don't have a strong opinion which rates should be in the article, however I just checked the number for Spain in the cited OECD stats page and it is given there equal 10.6 USD PPPs / hour in 2020; for other countries the numbers also do not seem to match. Maybe I got something wrong, maybe the entire table should be double-checked and corrected. Birdofpreyru (talk) 19:01, 27 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

That's strange; you're right, some of the numbers are off. I thought I double-checked some of the entries when this table was added and they were correct...I wonder if the OECD possibly revised their PPP inflation deflator? Wow! Maybe they did; this InternetArchive link shows different numbers on 2021-12-01 than now (I can't seem to get the hourly on the archive, but the yearly is different between then and now) [1] - maybe we should list the day the source was read? That's a little funky that they are (potentially) revising their inflation numbers (at least that's my best guess as to why these numbers are different)...strange... ---Avatar317 ^(talk) 20:42, 27 April 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Proposed summary for technical prose

I've been using Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental large language model to create summaries for the most popular articles with {{Technical}} templates. This article, Minimum wage, has such a template in the "Welfare and labor market participation" section. Here is the paragraph summary at grade 5 reading level which Gemini 2.5 Pro suggested for that section:

The minimum wage affects people deciding if they want to look for a job. When the minimum wage goes up, companies might offer fewer jobs, making it harder for people to find one. But, if the minimum wage is very low, raising it a little might make more people want to look for work and could even help people who don't have jobs. If the minimum wage is already high, raising it more could make fewer people want to work and might mean more people end up unemployed.

While I have read and may have made some modifications to that summary, I am not going to add it to the section because I want other editors to review, revise if appropriate, and add it instead. This is an experiment with a few dozen articles initially to see how these suggestions are received, and after a week or two, I will decide how to proceed. Thank you for your consideration. Cramulator (talk) 12:56, 2 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I am retracting this and the other LLM-generated suggestions due to clear negative consensus at the Village Pump. I will be posting a thorough postmortem report in mid-April to the source code release page. Thanks to all who commented on the suggestions both negatively and positively, and especially to those editors who have manually addressed the overly technical cleanup issue on six, so far, of the 68 articles where suggestions were posted. Cramulator (talk) 01:35, 5 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Math in the Welfare and labor market participation section

I believe the line, "On the other hand, if 𝑤 ≥ 𝑤∗, any increases in the minimum wage entails a decline in labor market participation and an increase in unemployment," while it does follow from the mathematics in the original source (pages 797 and 798), is incorrect because it ignores the increased willingness to work and ability to attract more skilled, talented, driven, and efficient workers at higher wages.

In the textbook's search-and-matching model, workers are identical and do not become more productive when pay rises, so once the minimum wage exceeds the efficiency-level wage w*, the higher wage simply makes vacancies less profitable, firms post fewer of them, labor-market tightness and the job-finding rate fall, the value of unemployment drops, participation slips, unemployment climbs, and employment contracts; but this result does not hold in reality because higher wages attract abler and more motivated applicants, boost productivity, and cut turnover. Empirical studies that allow for such selection and efficiency-wage channels often find only small or zero employment losses, suggesting the net effect depends on how strongly those positive mechanisms offset firms' reduced vacancy creation. See for example, Dal Bó, et al. (2013) "Strengthening state capabilities: The role of financial incentives in the call to public service" Quarterly Journal of Economics 128(3): 1169–1218, on page 1171 and Dube, A. (2019) "Impacts of minimum wages: Review of the international evidence" London: HM Treasury, on pp. 2-3, e.g., "Overall the most up-to-date body of research from US, UK and other developed countries points to a very muted effect of minimum wages on employment...."

@Mersenne56, would you please comment? Cramulator (talk) 00:45, 28 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]