Most labor laws have been enacted after the problems they sought to address had already been eliminated by the market.
For example, the last two minimum wage increases in the U.S. had almost no impact on the economy either way, because wages were almost universally already higher than the minimum.
Child Labor as a widespread practice ended decades before child labor laws were instituted. Except in cases where the children had to work to survive (like on poor rural farms), in which case they continued to work whether the law technically allowed them to or not.
Minimum wages are a perfect example of a compassionate-sounding idea that is either useless or detrimental to the poor. If a person’s labor is only worth $4 per hour, and the government passes a law saying that employers must pay $6 per hour, then they simply won’t hire that person. In this way, minimum wages act as a barrier to entry into the workforce for the poorest and least educated among us. If they are already making more than that, it has no effect. Minimum wages only have a small beneficial effect to the small number of people in the margins - those people that are worth more than they are being paid, but work in small, niche markets where there is little competitive pressure and/or some other kind of market failure.
The U.S. hasn’t seen drastic market effects from government minimum wage manipulation simply because the wage is already so low that small changes to it have little to no impact. But look at other countries that have much higher minimum wages - what typically happens is that unemployment spikes, then the government steps in and starts subsidizing companies that hire these workers through training supplements, bonuses, etc. The end result is little more than welfare. And that causes all kinds of curious distortions that hurt poor people - like, people can’t afford to move up, because no one will hire them unless they are subsidized. So these people wind up being stuck where they are with no job mobility, the companies suffer under endless red tape, and the government uses the fact that it’s paying companies a subsidy to justify meddling in the company’s affairs.
The other problem with minimum wages is that they take resiliency out of the market in bad times. Normally, if the economy or a market goes into recession, a company has the option of rolling back wages in order to survive. If worker productivity declines, then workers aren’t worth as much. But if your workers are already at the minumum wage and their productivity declines further, you have no alternatives but to fire them. Thus minimum wage laws cause unemployment to spike when times get tough, which puts a stress on social programs and government budgets.
The minumum wage should be abolished.
) The woman of course said that it was not discrimination for the companies to not allow flex time for childless employees. Of course she also seemed to imply that those that did not have children where worthless…grr.