One of the purposes of the Fair Labor Standards Act's establishment of the federal minimum wage is that companies that employ people at the lowest wages cost the rest of us money, since those workers need tax-funded assistance like food stamps just to survive.
How does Walmart cost that money? If the company was to disappear, how would the tax-funded assistance drop? Is there evidence that Walmart prevents those employees from getting higher wages?
> One of the purposes of the Fair Labor Standards Act's establishment of the federal minimum wage is that companies that employ people at the lowest wages cost the rest of us money,
If you want to defend wage floors, going back to the "original purpose" of the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act is probably a bad strategy.
"People employed at the lowest wages" was, at the time, a very strong dog-whistle for "immigrants and black people". The FLSA was passed with broad support from unions like the AFL, but that's because they wanted to ensure that their (largely white) members were employed and didn't have their jobs "stolen" by poorer immigrants and black people who were willing to work for less.
In other words, unions were betting that wage floors would mean "employees getting paid more, but fewer people employed", and they (correctly) assumed that discrimination against black people and immigrants would ensure that the white union members would still be among the group of people who remained employed.
> “The Caucasians . . . are not going to let their standard of living be destroyed by negroes, Chinamen, Japs or any others - Samuel Gompers, who founded the American Federation of Labor
While there is plenty of racism to find in the early days of the AFL (including from Gompers who e.g. described the Japanese as "evil" in the same issue of the American Federationist that your quote is from), that quote is out of context. It is from the September 1905 issue of American Federationist, where the full paragraph says:
> [Gompers] declared he was always ready to assert his patriotism on behalf of the colored man, saying " 'Tis true that some white men have been angered at the introduction of black strike breakers. I have stood as a champion of the colored man and have sacrificed self and much of the movement that the colored man should get a chance. But the Caucasians are not going to let their standard of living be destroyed by negroes, Chinamen, Japs or any others.
The statement fell in a discussion of black workers being pulled in as strike breakers in Chicago (the issue is returned to in a later section in the same article, warning that continued strike breaking would trigger race hate), not in the context of any discussion of minimum wage.
Curiously it is almost always quoted the way you do, with the "..." which do not appear in the original source (nor is any text cut from the quote at that point), and out of context, and is generally used to prop up modern attacks on the minimum wage.
Finding examples of racist then is easy - many unions still did not admit non-white members, and Gompers himself e.g. argued strongly for continued strict restriction on Asian immigration to the US and used racist language to do it.
But that quote is a curious choice both to use as a demonstration of Gompers or AFL racism given the context, and to quote in dicussions about minimum wage given that it's not what the quote is about.
The racism is ugly and fitting for its time, but this is actually a case where it comes from a legitimate concern, not just competitive hatred -- If immigrants work for lower wages, society overall suffers. Someone else being willing to work for less than is a legitimate concern.
When white natives decided to work for less, they got hateful slurs too. They were called "scabs", and their was no racial motivation to it.
Gompers took us halfway -- to wage floors, and the Equal Rights / Anti-Discrimination laws took us the other half, to a comprehensive platform of support for the entire working class. (Of course, that platform still has holes and erosions and needs repairs)
