Earlier quoted context omitted.
As I noted above, if we had UBI to cover bare essentials, we wouldn't need a minimum wage. That's basically what Walmart abuses anyways via the welfare system; it's almost a subsidy to make their model kind of glue-together in the end. Let's just make it explicit. Pass UBI, repeal minimum wage laws.
Just look at the chaos being cause by COVID bucks right now - fast food joints offering $15 an hour and $500 signing bonuses and still having no takers. That anyone has the guts to still be pushing UBI when we can see how a limited UBI with the current government handouts are utterly destroying the current labor market is beyond reprehensible.
It's not destroying anything, it's giving labor bargaining power back versus capital. Yes, it's harder to hire workers at $X/hour when they have alternatives. That's the whole point of UBI.
Also note that pre-handouts, the companies were hiring workers for $10/hour, now they're willing to pay $15/hour with bonus (and can't find anyone). What that means is that companies actually had room to pay much higher than they were actually paying (and still make sufficient profit) - so the previous wage was not a fair market wage, but was rather exploitation; which the article goes into below:
"Labor markets in capitalist economies are fundamentally tilted against individual workers’ ability to bargain effectively with employers. Policy does not have to be rigged for employers to give them particular clout in labor markets; instead, the very nature of these labor markets gives them clout. In the past, when economic growth was broadly shared across the population, it was because policymakers understood this basic asymmetry and used policy levers to bolster the leverage and bargaining power of workers. Conversely, recent decades’ rise of inequality and anemic wage growth has resulted from a stripping away of these policy bulwarks to workers’ labor market power."
https://www.epi.org/publication/what-labor-market-changes-ha...