Minimum wage hurts blacks, stats show

An economist compares minimum-wage laws, restricting or eliminating low-employability workers from employment, to Jim Crow-era banning of blacks from certain jobs.

Futhermore, there’s ample evidence that increases in the legislated minimum wage in the U.S. have a disparate negative impact on the employment prospects of blacks, and especially young blacks.

So even if such racial discrimination was not among Congress’s intended consequences of its minimum-wage legislation, ought not the “disparate impact” doctrine of Griggs v. Duke Power Co. – a statistics-based doctrine favored by the Obama administration – be used to find minimum-wage legislation to be a violation of the U.S. Constitution?

The economist can’t comment on constitutional issues here, only call minimum-wage supporters’ attention to their anomalous position.