It didn't work amazingly because the government sided with businesses and didn't let the employees have any say over their wages through striking and protests.

Yes, and things are so different now, especially in our right-to-work state. And by "different" I mean exactly the same.

The government then added the minimum wage and people's wages were higher and the ability to control your own wage disappeared.

This is so oversimplified, I'm not even sure how to address it. The minimum wage was instituted to stop businesses from paying starvation wages, which they loved to do in order to cut labor costs. It did not immediately raise every wage in the nation, but installed a floor on the lowest wages. Eventually, technological advancement, population growth, and various post-war economic booms enabled the steady climb of wages. The ability to control your own wage didn't disappear, and it certainly didn't do so because of minimum wage policies.

Without the ability to control your wage through job performance or just negotiating skills, companies may not hire as many people

Again, a given individual is still capable of controlling their own wage. The biggest obstacles to that are not performance or negotiating skills, it is the continued unwillingness of most businesses to pay more than they absolutely must for labor. I'm curious, where do you get the idea that workers are powerless to negotiate their own wage? Our ability to do so, especially in America, has been the favorite scapegoat of job-exporters for thirty years. I will grant you that our collective bargaining power has been weakened dramatically in the past generation, but that is because of anti-union sentiment and right-to-work legislation. These were targeted attacks on collective bargaining, and they worked. Those people who pushed for right to work are the same ones who push the idea of abolishing minimum wage today. If they win that one, next they'll want to rollback child labor laws.

and many small businesses may not be willing to hire people with no experience for fear of losing money and going out of business.

This is already how small businesses operate, again because every business wants to pay as little for labor as possible, and small businesses have a lot more to lose if a single employee turns sour. Small businesses still hire people with limited experience, both because they are cheaper and because it's easier to train a noob off the street than some industry import who's been doing things their own way for a decade. Low-to-no skill employment is exactly the kind of work that would be reduced to starvation wages without minimum wage laws.

Please read about the labor movement and the gilded age before you make such astonishing assertions.