A better metric: "How much do jobs pay that are easily available to me?" (And so in this sense, the wages of Wallmart and Amazon seem to be very much relevant for many.)
Another metric: "How long does it take to earn enough for my baseline expenses (rent, food, health, retirement money, etc.)".
In my opinion, this is the only valid metric.
If a business cannot pay people enough to live, the business should not exist. Businesses do not have more of a right to exist than the workers that make them up. Full stop.
I'll assume you are talking about full time all year jobs. Each one of the baseline expenses defined above are not nominally set in stone. They are different for every person. I might define baseline food as beans and rice, while others might define it as steak and lobster. The same goes for the other baseline expenses defined above. This is why allowing individuals to make decisions is so important. If you want to dismiss the idea of any one person deciding for themselves what that baseline is, there would have to be a group(gov't/union) to decide what these baselines are. One problem I have is if you allow some group to decide what this baseline is, you lose your ability to decide as an individual what your baseline is. Additionally, resources that could have been allocated to you are now allocated to dealing with the regulations and or bureaucracy.
Furthermore, some individuals do not need that baseline, whatever it may be. A child supported by parents may have other expenses covered. A retiree who just wants to be employed to stay sane, may not need all the wages and benefits that a parent of three may need. Paying them less does lower the market price of labor though.
> Businesses do not have more of a right to exist than the workers that make them up. Full stop.
I agree. The opposite is true as well. Businesses, aka transactions between people, have just as much a right to exist as the people that do the transacting. Setting aside the statutory protections that LLCs, corporations, etc. provide, a business can be a single person hiring people to do work for them, or a single person who does all the work for themselves(eg. cobbler). The right to interact with others for goods and services is a fundamental right.
It feels deeply infantilizing to me, and will absolutely cut off the bottom rung of society and hasten the unprepared and unskilled towards the coming AI cliff in my opinion.
I personally did not have my own shit together enough to earn minimum wage, not quite, at the very start. $15/hr+ starts to become a mountain that the least well-off cannot land a position earning, or cannot stay competitive at that rate, in some parts of the nation.
