I am arguing that they would rather be paid some wage rather than have no job available.
A backpacker who just wants to make enough money to get to their next destination probably doesn't want to deal with the overhead of taking on a full-time job and is happy to have the flexibility in exchange for less money.
Fair is determined by the two people who are party to the transaction. If they both agree to it, then they consider it to be fair. If it is unfair, they are free to decline. The opinions of unrelated third-parties about whether a transaction is "fair" are irrelevant.
How many transient backpackers actually work for these companies to fund their immediate journeys and what do they have to do with a debate on localized externalities that they never experience?
No idea. It is probably not anywhere near the number of salaried employees who bully local governments into passing wage laws they will never experience the unintended consequences of. Yet somehow they still feel entitled to decide for other people what working arrangements they should be allowed to make for themselves.
Let's assume for a moment that people are not helpless imbeciles who need us to tell them what to do and that they choose the best option available to them, within the constraints of their life. Let's further assume that they are more familiar and better equipped to balance the constraints of their lives than we are.
Then we can deduce that if we remove the option they have chosen by making it illegal they will necessarily be left with a worse option. Since if there had been a better one, they would have taken it.
If we feel that the best option they have is not good enough because it makes us feel bad or whatever, then the question we should ask is "How can we make better options available?", not "How can we take away the best of the available options?"
Legislating a price floor does
not magically change the underlying economics of a business. It just makes the jobs below that floor go away.
> Legislating a price floor does not magically change the underlying economics of a business. It just makes the jobs below that floor go away.
It may make some of those jobs go away. The price of the product/service will go up a bit, which will reduce a demand a bit, so the market will get oversaturated supply-side until some of the companies in it scale down or close up. Those who lose jobs will be worse off, those who will keep jobs will be better off. Yes, it sucks for those who lost jobs, but we can cater to them elsewhere in the system (e.g. different industry).
Competition will happily push the salary floor to as low as legally possible, so it's up to the legal system to ensure that floor doesn't go too low; in fact, I'd argue laws should be always set up in a way so that doing unsustainable business off unlivable wages should not be possible. The market is good at figuring out solutions to multifaceted problems, so let it deal with that constraint.
> Let's assume for a moment that people are not helpless imbeciles who need us to tell them what to do and that they choose the best option available to them, within the constraints of their life.
That's a big assumption to make, especially on the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum; desperation often leads to suboptimal decisions:
The argument is not that these people shouldn’t be able to find work, but that they should get paid fairly for the work they do.