CAC1001- Historically immigrants have always been willing to work for less. The Irish and the blacks and other ethnic groups used to have riots where they battled one another over this.
IMO, this is not because of their ethinticity, but because they are still used to, or are willing and capable to live at the lower standard of living they had in the countries they emmigrated from. A law that forces immigrants to assimilate to our culture quicker, would do more to raise their wages, than a law that you have to pay them a certain amount, since they would need to make more money to maintain their higher living standards and therefore would demand higher pay themselves, they would also learn the most important part of the equation in getting a raise is they need more skills, making their labor more valuable to their employer and would concentrate on learning those skills needed for advancement instead of blaming others for their willingness to work cheaper.
A small business cannot absorb the higher costs from a minimum wage in the way a big business can. Same thing with regulations. Sometimes big businesses in an industry will push for heavy regulations because the compliance costs will wipe out their competitors.
I don't think any buisiness, big or small, can absorb higher labor costs without hurting their bottom line. Any product can only support a certain level of overhead before the cost of that product needs to increase and any product can only go to a certain level before it will start to lose sales. I do completely agree with your point about regulation though.
How is not having a minimum wage "thinking of the businesses" though? The market sets the actual minimum wage, and it is the price of the labor offered by the workers versus what the employers will pay. It isn't the businesses' fault if the wage is set very low for particular forms of labor.
I think it could be argued that having a minimum wage arbitrarilly increased hurts the workers more than the buisinesses. Say you have a hourly budget for labor of 20 dollars for your product. At a minimum wage of 5$ you can hire 4 workers, if the government, or a union, comes in and says that you need to raise the wage to 6$, you can only afford to pay three workers, or you have to raise the price of your product. If the market will only support the original price you either lose money and go out of buisiness and all workers get hurt, or one worker has to go find another job, if they can.
Wages are not being held artificially high right now. They tried this during the Great Depression and it is believed to have held unemployment higher than what it would have been.
Imo, wages are both being held artificially high and at the same time being held artificially low, through governmental intrusion. For low or unskilled workers the minimum wage is artificially raising their wage above market value, since if the market could naturally support those wages there would be no need for the minimum wage in the first place. For higher skilled workers their wages are being reduced artificially through things like social security, health benefit requirements, unemployment insurance and the like. Employers would not pay more than what an employee is worth to them, so everything in their pay package that is mandated reduces the wage the skilled employee can negotiate.
If illegals are granted amnesty, and are willing to work for less than current wages, I most certainly think that the unions want the minimum wage in order to price them out of the market. And yes it was the case, read up on the New Deal in particular regarding this.
Some of the largest beneficaries of illegals' labor are unions, in my experience unions really don't care if it is an american paying dues or an illegal as long as they get those dues. When I worked in SoCal, the laborers where pretty upfront about their union having a buisiness agent who would help them get fake documents and then send them out to jobs. Unions also have another trick up their sleeve, it is called prevailing wage. It is explained as a wonderful, unselfish thing they do to help non-union workers, the only problem with that explanation, is that without prevailing wage laws, unions would be priced out of the market.
What ended that were laws demanding safe working environments, laws giving weekends, laws preventing corporations from demanding you work an assembly line sixteen hours a day with no bathroom breaks even, for seven days a week, etc...
I am glad you said laws demanding, and not laws creating safe working enviroments. I am not a fan of oversight, since imo, while sounds good it makes matters worse. The best way to regulate anything is undersight. As a worker in a pretty dangerous field, I have noticed that most safety rules(oversight) make workers less safe, whereas having the worker watch out for themselves make them far safer(undersight). One such rule states that overhead powerlines need to have markers to warn workers of the hazard, and I have seen a quite a few different pieces of equipment run into lines because someone or something(wind) had moved the markers, whereas if an employee is taught to watch out for the powerlines and not the markers, accidents are far less likely to happen. Undersight would also work for any market as well. Making the consumer responsible for controlling prices for example, would go a long way to prevent boom and bust housing markets for example. Teaching people to watch out for hazards(like overpriced housing), succeeds far better than trying to eliminate the hazards through oversight and regulation because the world is a dangerous place and no matter how many rules there are hazards still exist. Education allows free choice, oversight does not. I know lots of people that choose to work long hours, to work 7 days a week so they can make more money to buy everything they want, on the otherhand I prefer to keep my expenses as low as possible so I can have all the free time I can possibly afford. Let's leave life choices, employment choices, wage choices up to the individual, not some bureacrat or groups of bureacrats who think they know better what we want or need.
).