Minimum wage should be $21.72 per hour.

[mythology]

65. The problem with your example

is that the labor that goes into an individual item has been dropping. The worker productivity levels have been rising over time due to automation and so forth. So the cost of labor in the price of an item has been shrinking over time.

In the agreement Yum Foods (parent company of Taco Bell, KFC etc) and then later other fast food companies, reached with the CIW, the fast food companies agreed to pay 1 extra penny per pound of vegetables which amounted to about a 75% raise for farmworkers. Given that far less than a pound of lettuce and tomatoes are on any individual Taco Bell taco, the increased cost is less than 1 cent per taco.

Granted part of why that little amount of money could make such an impact in farmworkers' lives is that they made so little in the first place, but it's still indicative of the cost of labor in the cost of an item.

http://www.ciw-online.org/agreementanalysis.html