Hi, this is John Donovan. Before we get to the main event, I just want to let you know that our fall 2015 season of debates is launching this month.

We're going to be having our first podcast release on September 23rd. The season is looking good. We're going to be doing a lot of topics that include sexual assault on campus, China, U.S. relations. That's when we do every year or two.

Funding our nation's infrastructure. That's the first for us. Students taking smart drugs. Is it fair or not?

Across the tutorial abuse, the central banks and the constitutionality of affirmative action.

So you can purchase tickets to all of these upcoming debates, which will be taking place in New York or Washington, D.C. or Chicago.

Go to our website at IQ2US.org or you can listen to our debates right here on our podcast.

And you can also watch our debates when they're live. Just go to our complete podcast archive and get instant debate updates with the IQ2US mobile app. It is gorgeous.

And it's available in the App Store and on Google Play.

Okay, that's it on to the main event of this podcast.

When we think of Labor Day, many of us think of the end of summer and the barbecues and often forget its origins as a creation of the labor movement.

It's a working man's holiday. Ratified by Congress in 1894, it was a day set aside to honor American workers and their contributions to the power and the health of our nation's economy.

But what about the struggles of today's low wage workers? As a $15 minimum wage is adopted in cities like Seattle and San Francisco, we'd like to take a look back now at a debate we held in April of 2013 when we examined the need for a minimum wage and asked whether it helps or hurts the economy and our workers.

The motion being debated that night was abolish the minimum wage arguing for the motion is James A. Doran of the Kato Institute, his debate partner is Russell Roberts, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution arguing against the motion is Jared Bernstein, former chief economist, vice president Joe Biden, his debate partner is former US ambassador to the OECD Karen Cornblow.

Russell Roberts begins the debate by addressing the potential friction between higher wages and job opportunity.

We need to abolish the minimum wage and there's only one argument that matters on this issue and it's the moral argument.

Does the minimum wage make the world a better place? Does it improve or hurt the lives of the poorest American families and the workers who are in those families?

Now those Americans with the least education and the lowest skill levels have struggled tremendously over the last three decades.

They find themselves in competition with machines, computers, automation, with foreign workers, their job opportunities of shrunk, but the minimum wage is the wrong way to help those people.

It attacks the effects of economic change rather than doing anything about the underlying causes and by doing so it hurts the people that we're trying to help.

You don't need a special theory of the labor market or a degree in economics to understand that making workers artificially more expensive makes it harder for them to find work.

95% of workers who are paid the hourly wage, which is about 75 million Americans, 95% of those who make more than the minimum wage already.

And that includes my cleaning lady who I pay over two times the minimum wage.

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