[gonzobonzo]

People sell something to survive (their labor, their goods, etc.). It doesn't mean that every single transaction they make is for the sake of survival, or that external actors are a better judge of what their prices must be.

In college I would often make some extra spending money by partaking in social science experiments. I didn't really care if the compensation was below minimum wage - I had time, it was easy enough, and it was easy to opt in when I could. I wasn't doing it for survival, but for a bit of extra spending cash. If someone forced them to significantly increase wages, I might have benefited, but it's far more likely that they would done fewer experiments with a more select group and I would have been worse off.

If someone is on the edge, and it's only a minimum wage job that they have open for them, California's minimum wage could help them if they're one of the lucky ones who benefit from it, or could hurt them if they were one of the people hurt by the loss of 18,000 jobs it caused (per the linked report). A policy that leads to fewer jobs that pay more tends to just increase inequality.