In the 1970s, price floors on airline tickets caused wasteful increases in the quality of airline trips. Does the minimum wage cause wasteful increases in the quality of workers? If so, how? In other words, how are minimum-wage workers like airplane trips?

The argument in the air ticket example is that airlines increases the quality of services, e.g., offering fancy meals to passengers and other customized personal services, when the ticket price was increased externally through a price floor. This was done as a way of retaining consumers who must pay a higher price now. One can make a case that similar scenario could be applied to minimum wage, but the adjustment is done by workers, who can now sell their labor at a higher price. Fearing the loss of employment, workers might increase the quality of their service, e.g., working overtime without pay, working harder, less shirking, etc, once they are paid a higher minimum wage. But it is probably unfair that we can this increase in quality wasted, because the increase quality of labor benefits someone, either consumers or owners, at the end of the day.