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If you think about the labor market as a market, individual employers/employees are willing to pay a variety of prices. Some people will be willing to work for $10, 12, or 14/hr, etc and some business can afford to pay $20/hr and some only $10 without going under. So if the labor price goes up from $10 to $12 there will be more workers (since the people willing to work for $12 are now in the pool), and if the labor price goes down from $20/hr to $10/hr there will be more jobs (since business that are only viable at $10/hr will exist now). Normally the going rate for a given job would be around where supply=demand. If there are too few potential employees, the jobs that can pay $20/hr will get the workers and the jobs that can only pay $10/hr will go under. If there too few jobs, the going rate will go down, and now jobs that can only afford to pay less will be viable. The danger I see with trying to achieve social progress by mandating every job be a "good job" is that it is very easy this way to create a situation where supply != demand. If you simply mandate no jobs pay less than $20/hr, the businesses that are only viable at $10/hr will go under. But if supply=demand before, and a bunch of jobs disappear, now you have people that can't get a job at all. So you've created some winners, but only at the expense of the people who are least competitive in the job market. And to use Uber as a specific example, sure they can raise their prices, but fewer people will take Uber and the demand for drivers will still be reduced. This is a simplification of course. Maybe even if the overall market can't afford to pay more, particular companies can, and unions could achieve better price discrimination for labor. Or raising the minimum wage a moderate amount may only have a minimal effect on demand. But I think the overall model of individual employees and employers with individual prices is pretty solid. If you follow this model, the best way to achieve progress is probably not to ban low-paying jobs from existing. It would be to create a greater number of jobs (some of which are higher paying) and then the low-paying jobs will be forced to either raise their wages or cease to exist naturally. By doing it that way there won't be a job shortage. I think the government still has a major role to play in this, but it's a more complicated one than just mandating what the market price should be for a transaction to be allowed. China is probably an example of this sort of development. Before the trade war, factories were already moving out of China (to Vietnam, etc) because the wages there have gone up so much. There are certainly many problems and it is certainly not a developed country yet. But the wage (and overall economic) growth over the past few decades has been almost unimaginable [1]. [1] https://tradingeconomics.com/china/wages |