system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why there is only one minimum wage, rather than some sort of "tiered" system?

One common argument I hear against the $15 minimum wage is the whole "why should fast food workers make $15 an hour when EMTs only make $12 an hour" anecdote.

Have any countries or states taken a "tiered" approach to minimum wage, organized by job function or something? To continue the previous example: fast food workers would have a minimum wage of $12, emergency medical workers would have a minimum wage of $15, etc. Would it just be that this would be difficult/impossible to enforce (given grey area positions), or is there some other reason why this is a bad idea?
gpt
Well that would defeat the point of the minimum wage. The minimum wage isn't "this is how much this job is worth", it's "this is how much a person is worth, and how much a person needs to *live*." The closest thing to job-based minimum wages is unions, which individually mandate minimum wages for different jobs within them, if the work is unionized.

There also isn't a single minimum wage. There's a federal minimum wage, but then states have their own minimum wages, as do some counties and cities. Their wages can't be lower than any of the larger bodies they're in, but they can make them higher.

Some states also have tipped minimum wages, where employers can pay less, as long as the employee makes enough in tips to bring their pay up to the regular minimum wage.

Sidenote: The "why should fast food workers make $15 an hour when EMTs only make $12 an hour" argument never made sense to me, since it pretends that EMTs wouldn't also be affected by the minimum wage increase.