Should There Be a Minimum Wage?
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Wages should be set by workers’ needs, not by market bargaining. Left to the market, wages come out of an unequal contest between employers and workers, so there’s no reason to expect them to be fair. Instead, a fair wage can be worked out from what a worker needs to live decently, then fixed by law.
Justice H. B. Higgins made this argument in the 1907 Harvester judgment, which laid the groundwork for Australia’s basic wage. He rejected leaving pay to the unequal contest of the market and based a fair wage instead on “the normal needs of the average employee, regarded as a human being living in a civilised community.”
a fair wage
Higgins is fudging political/legal justice and economic justice.
To find out what one man finds economically fair, you’d have to ask him. He wouldn’t agree to an employment offer he doesn’t find fair. He must find it better than whatever else he can reasonably expect to do with his time, otherwise he wouldn’t voluntarily enter into the contract (see #6123).
Should he later find that the employer tricked him somehow, he can sue. It’s one thing to have laws for that (political justice). It’s another thing entirely to forbid some employment in the first place.