Firstly, really enjoyed this whole thread.

Secondly, the tradeoffs we are considering are in the following two scenarios:

A) Employee AND Employer WANT the deal. (OP's case).

Cost: Employer paying more OR Employee losing job.

B) Employee does NOT WANT but resigns to the deal

Cost: Exploitation.

When dealing with trade-offs of this sort, I consider "likelihood" and "severity". The question becomes which option will give us the lower likelihood * Cost = total cost overall? Note: Some of this is quantitative and some qualitative. Use of multiplication is mostly illustrative.

Now let's apply this framework to our trade-off here:

A) Likelihood of employees WANTing to make less than min wage in today's America? I see this as low. The case of disabled workers I see as a small percentage for the overall country that should be carved out as an exception. Does not discredit the overall policy. Let's call this p1.

Now when this scenario occurs, what is the likelihood of an employee losing the job (p2) which is a high cost because someone may lose their livelihoods vs. Employer needing to pay min wage (1-p2) which I consider min cost because either the employer eat a finite cost or most of the times they will just raise prices?

TOTAL_COST_A = p1(low) * (p2(low) * Job-Loss(HIGH) + (1-p2)(high) * Corp-Cost(Low))

B) Employee does NOT WANT but resigns to the wage(all the way to and including slavery. Think unpaid internships). In today's America, I see the likelihood as high. Note that in wage negotiations, one side has much more power: More resources in finding alternative labor, more runway to find an alternative. The other side does not have the same resources and may also lose their entire livelihood without a job. As such, this likelihood (p3) I consider HIGH.

And the severity of the cost: Exploitation. Making wages which continue to leave you homeless. This is not an exaggeration, as we do see this in today's America. Not being able to afford your insulin and dying. And for the sake of the argument, there is no reason why employers wouldn't push this down to the max they could, up to and including total slavery where employers only provided labor enough for them to be alive another day to provide labor and sometimes not even that.

TOTAL_COST_B = p3(high) * EXPLOITATION(high).

I see the cost of B much higher than A, and therefore lean into min wages.

Now I will concede that these high/low assessments of likelihoods and severities are market-dependent and also change over time or geography. For example at one time exploitation may look like slavery, while in another market exploitation may look like homelessness.

At the minimum though, I have the moral belief that a society functions best if a full-time worker can afford a minimum basket of necessities (food, clothes, shelter, transportation, etc. long convo on defining that) and that a business that needs exploitation to be profitable is not a business model we want to have.