While there are advantages to living in the richest nation that the world has ever known; that doesn’t end up meaning a whole heck of a lot for those that make up the underclass of people that work in jobs in which the wages so being paid to them, the work conditions, so of, and the hours and schedule, therein, are in reality, unfair to them. The biggest problem with capitalism and a structure in which companies are permitted to offer wages to potential employees that are in harmony with the prevailing minimum wage and no more than that, is that the minimum wage, does not represent a fair or a living wage for all those that make that minimum wage or are marginally above such.
In point of fact, there isn’t any good reason to have a minimum wage if that wage is not representative of a living wage, for a minimum wage that does not represent a living wage, is by definition, not a fair wage. There are plenty of economists and capitalists that will argue that the wages so being paid to potential employees, are always subject to the conditions of the marketplace as well as the throughput so produced by that employee; this thereby represents to them, at least, the justification of why wages can thereby be below a living wage. While that is indeed one way to look upon the issue, it isn’t the most appropriate way – because, in fact, any employer that cannot pay a living wage to every potential employee that they so desire to hire, should be precluded from hiring that employee, and thereby then let the chips fall where they will so fall.
In reality, what so occurs in America, is that the employer is almost always in the position of power, and the potential employee, in absence of a strong trade union, or a mandated living wage, or a skillset that just so happens to be in demand, is the vulnerable petitioner for that employment. Those that do the employing, implicitly know that people need wages in order to procure food, shelter, healthcare, and the like, and therefore those employers are able to exploit that power to their advantage. After all, for many an employer, there isn’t any compelling reason to pay a fair wage, when the person so applying for work, is in no position to fight back -- but pretty much has been reduced to accepting whatever wage that is put in front of their face, or suffer the ill effects of no wage at all.
Perhaps there was a time when a mandated minimum wage law, was structured fairly and made perfect sense – but that time, if it ever existed, has long passed. This thus signifies that the minimum wage needs to be fully and completely replaced with a mandated living wage, which would thereby represent a fair wage; subject, just as Social Security benefits are subject to, a yearly inflation adjustment, so that it thereby remains a living wage, year-by-year. It is vital to remember this well, no modern-day nation, is worth its salt, if it treats its own domestic workforce as a labor body which should be subject to exploitation -- but rather that nation has an obligation, instead, to provide its laboring people with something of substance, and thereby of respect.