Why not let the employees decide if the job is worth taking? If there exists people willing to voluntarily take a job given its wage/conditions, you have a job to offer.
* The switching cost for jobs is very high. You lose the social network of people you know at the old job, all of the knowledge and skill that's specific to that company goes out the window, you may have to uproot and move.
* Jobs are not transparent. It is fantastically hard to tell if a new job is going to be better than your current job. You know the base numbers like pay, but you have little way to accurately evaluate the culture, office politics, other people, management, company direction, etc.
* In many areas, there are few jobs to choose between. Amazon fulfillment centers are a good example because they hire many people in a areas with few other jobs to choose from. (This is also, I think, a big reason for the demographic changes towards cities in the US today: they give employees access to a more diverse job market.)
* Jobs are not homogeneous and interchangeable. One job might have better hours or a shorter commute but worse coworkers. One may pay more but have worse health insurance. There is so much variance that it's impossible to define an "optimal" job or even precisely compare two jobs.
That's not a deal any government, or any taxpayers, should want to be a part of. I don't want my taxes subsidizing profitable corporations because they can find people willing to work for sub-poverty wages who fill in the gaps using the welfare state.
A well functioning market drives down the cost of goods and services to the minimum possible price, provided there's adequate competition. Commoditization is a good thing. The fact that bread and milk only cost a few dollars is net-good for society. Commoditization of labor should, thus, also be similarly good for society.
At the end of the day, we as a society (rightly) demand a minimum standard of living for everyone, and we collectively pay for that one way or the other. Either we pay taxes to fund a welfare state, or we pay inflated prices for goods and services to maintain wage floors. I'd argue that paying taxes for welfare is more progressive, as the burden falls on richer people. Paying inflated prices for goods and services is regressive as it's a burden that falls equally on the rich and the poor.
As long as we make sure that markets are competitive via regulation and that everything is commoditized, this sounds like a welfare problem and not a wage problem.
If you need welfare to cover the cost of living for full-time workers, then that is very much corporate welfare.
For sure, that's one way to look at it, but the rest of my comment lays out why welfare is the least bad way to maintain standard of living.
An employer doesn't just have X jobs to fill a business. They have some number of tasks to do, and there's always more they could be doing. If they have the option of hiring some people at $5/hr and some at $10/hr, the boss can figure out how to get at least $5/hr in value out of the cheaper people he hires.
I think the person living with parents is a bad example too. $1/hr is nothing, and it'd probably just be better for that person to not have a job at all. Sometimes doing nothing is better than having a job that crappy.
In a market without minimun wage you'll have to compete against such people for a job.
Lot of those people are illegal immigrants as well. They cant job hop.
I am talking about illegal immigrants who work for shady temp agencies and then are contracted to work for big players.
Another issue is that the unemployment rate is no longer meaningful although that could be solved by having another statistic but unemployment is much easier to measure.
However why do the prices have to be inflated? Can't the company just accept lower profits? That would be progressive since most of the profits currently go to the rich at least for public companies no?
You could argue we could go back to the 1800's in terms of labour standards, but don't be suprised when workers simply decide to kill their bosses and companies retaliating[1].
Diminishing labour rights is just asking for another violent class struggle.
Workers need wages and money to survive in the economy
Not if they inherited it. The key idea here is asymmetry of power. When people are desperate enough that they would take a sub-minimum wage job, this doesn't necessarily imply a "voluntary exchange". If you're facing starvation or medical bankruptcy, you are essentially being coerced to take any job you can find.
On top of that, taxpayers will have to foot the bill by funding welfare to all these people whose labor is being exploited. Especially since they increasingly don't have the negotiating power of a union to make this idealistic vision you have of the job market fair to both sides.
Techies like to believe they're enlightened when they lean libertarian, when in reality all that amounts to is privatized gains, socialized losses.
If you don't go full libertarian and you think that the state should provide some level of protection then things change because if people are not paid enough to live a decent life they'll end up falling into one of society's safety net (cost of law enforcement if people start stealing, cost of welfare if they require handouts to eat decently, cost to social security if they become sick due to poor living or working conditions etc...).
In such a situation you basically end with society subsidizing these jobs indirectly by cleaning the mess. That's why it makes more sense to simply force decent working conditions instead of encouraging a destructive race to the bottom.
Now in practice, regardless of our opinions, the USA is not a libertarian state, there are security nets, there is a certain level of socialized assistance (too much for some, not enough for others). In this situation it makes complete sense to have things like minimum wages and laws making it mandatory to wear your seat belt for instance.
Part of this belief is based on the fact that your question is a fake question (and that when it was clear that I was suspicious of your motives, you simply repeated it without any amplifying remarks - you knew I didn't understand, but you didn't do anything to help me understand you). That the answer is apparent to everyone involved, but drawing our attention to that answer doesn't actually add anything to the conversation. If your fake question did actually add to the topic, it would be a useful rhetorical device, but it doesn't. In effect, you've stated "people want to move to the US" and... that's it. How's that relevant? I don't think it is. I think it's just a veiled attempt to derail.
As such, I choose not to engage. If I have mistaken your intentions, I do apologise, but that's what I believe. In that case, at least now you know why I think you're acting in bad faith.
That's the way it should work. And in a functioning market, employees don't make these decisions alone against large corporations, they make those decisoins in large groups like voters or in a union. Thinking that each employer is free to offer and each employee is free to value whether its worth it makes for some kind of "free market" balance for labor is pretty naïve when it comes to individuals vs large corporations.
We wouldn't allow employers to bargain on risk and "letting the employee decide whether the risk is worth taking", I don't see any difference with wages.