> and it's not going to do anyone (besides exploitative employers) any good to have them paid even less I disagree, on the basis that a poorly-paid job is bett

> and it's not going to do anyone (besides exploitative employers) any good to have them paid even less I disagree, on the basis that a poorly-paid job is better than no job at all in the long run for the employee. A price floor causes a surplus, in this case of labor, meaning unemployed people; the people for whom the economic value of their labor is less than the minimum wage. You can call this free-market dogma if you'd like, but it's a well-established phenomenon. The second-order effect is that those unemployed people become less and less employable over time, since they lose out on the experience, skill-learning, and relationship-building that they would have gotten on the job, poorly-paid though it may have been. They become further less competitive than the lucky ones who made the cut above minimum wage and were employed, and runs the risk of being a permanently unemployable underclass. Countries like Norway and Singapore do quite well with no legally-mandated minimum wage.