>The people in power do everything they can to keep wages down.
Wages are set by the market through supply and demand
Wages are set by the market through supply and demand
But the low-skill, minimum wage jobs? No. Those wages are effectively set by the government. Every time an employer hires someone at minimum wage, they're really saying "I would pay you less if I legally could." And that's where the rich are making sure minimum wage stays low.
In any case, without a minimum wage, low-skill wages become a race to the bottom as people become more and more desperate for work. Someone might be willing to work for $1/hour because they're fine living in a cardboard box behind their workplace and eating scraps from the garbage.
But that only allows income inequality to worsen. The rich get even richer as they sit back and laugh as the employees essentially auction themselves to lower and lower wages. Upward mobility dies as the ability to seek extra education and training disappears because you gotta work 100 hours/week just to survive.
So yeah, I suppose minimum wage breaks supply and demand for wages, but I'd argue that's a damn good thing.
I agree the person who would work for less might even be the person taking the minimum wage job.
I disagree that this decreases class mobility though. Lowered labor costs mean lower barrier of entry to starting your own business. There’s a floor to how much it costs to start a labor dependent business and it’s based on minimum wage. That means you need substantial capital to get started. Also, lower wages means lower prices which disproportionately benefits poor people.
Hogwash. Are you sincerely arguing that an hour of work doesn't produce $9-15 (or whatever the minimum wage is, plus other overhead) of revenue for the company they work for?
The only time the market will consume more labor because its cheaper is if the amount of labor they already had was already insufficient, in which case if they really needed more people, they would have already hired them.
If labor were much cheaper, I personally might be willing to hire a maid, a gardener, a masseuse, a cook, etc. Similarly a retail business might hire more cashiers, or have more staff on the floor to answer customers questions and help them find things. A gas station might provide a full service experience for their customers. You could do this analysis for virtually any type of business and given cheaper labor they would hire more people.
Why is this so? Because the demand for labor, like goods, is infinite.