Inspired by an error-laden editorial by Senators Patty Murray and Bernie Sanders in support of a $15 national minimum wage, I’ve dedicated a series of myth-busting blog posts to debunk some of the most oft repeated claims.  So much of what is said about the minimum wage is simply not true.

So far we’ve established that minimum wage workers are not worse off than they used to be, that increasing the minimum wage will not reduce poverty, that most minimum wage workers are young and that most are not supporting a family with their wages.

Next we’ll examine the claim that the minimum wage has not kept pace with productivity.

While Senators Murray and Sanders don’t actually make this claim in their editorial, it’s a favorite of minimum wage advocates.  It goes something like this—if the minimum wage had kept pace with increases in worker productivity, today’s federal minimum wage would be nearly quadruple the current level.  Like some sort of urban legend, it has been repeated often enough that it has become an accepted part of the minimum wage policy debate.

The reasoning is that between 1968 and 2015, average labor productivity in the U.S. increased 135%, so the minimum wage today should increase commensurately to $27 per hour. 

Yes, you read that right.  Many advocates believe every worker in the country should be earning a minimum of $27 an hour.

Before we dive into explaining why this comparison of productivity and the minimum wage is meaningless, it is important to understand the flawed logic of how they even arrive at $27.  That calculation is based on the inflation-adjusted high point of the minimum wage in 1968, which immediately skews the result upward.  1968 is cherry-picked by minimum wage advocates as the baseline because doing so yields the highest wage.  For the sake of consistency, it should at least be compared to the inflation-adjusted minimum wage averaged out over the same 1968-2015 period they use to measure productivity, which would be $19 per hour.

Of course, as I mentioned earlier, even using a consistent apples-to-apples calculation, the comparison is absolutely meaningless because it relies on an apples-to-oranges comparison.

The labor productivity argument is based on the average productivity gains of all workers in every industry.  This includes the productivity of workers in high-tech industries, such as computer programmers and software engineers.  Not to mention the increases in productivity of manufacturing workers who have benefitted from efficiencies resulting from advances in mechanization.  Let’s be honest, thanks to the technology boom, certain sectors of the workforce have simply been more productive in recent decades than others.  The impressive increases in productivity in the world of computer programming alone have turbo-boosted the productivity average of U.S. workers as a whole.

As economist and Forbes contributor Jeffrey Dorfman explains, in order to paint an accurate picture of how minimum wages have fared compared to productivity, we must examine productivity gains in the jobs that actually pay minimum wage.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) doesn’t track the productivity of minimum wage workers, but they do measure the productivity of the food service industry, which employs almost half of all minimum wage workers.   

Not surprisingly, those productivity gains haven’t been quite as impressive as those in computer programming. 

According to BLS data, from 1987-2015 (1987 is the earliest year BLS data is available) worker productivity in the food service sector rose by an average of 0.4% per year.  During that same period of time, unit labor costs increased an average of 3.1% per year.  So the cost of labor in the fast food industry significantly outpaced the output of that labor.  To wit, the minimum wage increased by more than 116% (from $3.35 to $7.25) during that period, an average increase of around 4% every year. 

In other words, the minimum wage for workers in the food service industry has actually increased tenfold in comparison to their productivity gains.  

In contrast, during the same 1987-2015 year span, productivity of workers throughout the entire U.S. economy rose around an average of 2.2% per year.  That’s nearly six times the average annual productivity gains as the food service industry.  And once total compensation is factored in, average wages have grown with average productivity.

The productivity growth of the largest sector of minimum wage workers has clearly lagged behind the average productivity growth of all workers.   So why would we expect the wages of those minimum wage workers to keep pace with the productivity of all workers?  Just because computer programming pulled up average productivity and wages doesn’t mean it should also pull up burger flipping wages.

Ironically, as minimum wage hike mandates continues to pass, the food service industry will likely see its productivity increase in coming years, as restaurants and fast food operations turn to more efficient automation and hire workers with the most skills and experience (aka the most productive workers).

Unfortunately, this means the lowest skilled and least experienced burger flippers won’t have a job.