who are made out to be stupid enough to need protecting by "corporations, governments, and nonprofits" I said it below but I'll say it again here, I think this

who are made out to be stupid enough to need protecting by "corporations, governments, and nonprofits" I said it below but I'll say it again here, I think this article is reacting to a relatively recent trend among development people to portray the poor as knowing everything they need to get out of poverty if only they had the chance. This impression itself comes from the mistakes made by wealthy people in trying to dictate what the poor should do with their money before getting a proper understanding of their situation. Whats necessary is to find a balance here. But who defines "reasonable wages?" I agree that a government solution to defining reasonable wages will fail for the reasons you suggest. However, with no government intervention, corporations can probably easily exploit poor workers by having them work hard and paying them much less than they would anyone else. You can call this supply and demand, and it is, but that doesn't mean that some government intervention isn't right and proper. I'd argue that the governments should be watching out for extreme cases of exploitation (with respect to wages and other factors) and for the most part let free markets do their thing. Its true that this might prevent the extremely poor from getting these types of jobs (since they would be happy to work for wages that might be considered extreme exploitation) but I think thats the price we have to pay and we need to compensate by having direct government intervention in the case of these extremely poor people.