Competition is what drives companies to innovate with new products and technologies, use of automation to increase productivity, or the development of a new drug. This drive to convince a customer to buy your product versus a competitor created these innovations.
Unfortunately, there is also competition to reduce wages to poverty wages, overwork employees, offshore jobs, or even use slavery to attract capital, allowing companies to obtain a high P/E ratio that will boost share price or underprice their competitor in the market. Slavery was used by the U.S. to underprice cotton that was being exported by other countries such as India to Britain and still make a good profit. However, a company that develops an innovative process to suppress wages such as supporting anti-union politicians, firing workers, spying on workers, holding captive audience meetings, and even murdering Union organizers does not benefit the general welfare of society at all.
In general, finding new and innovative ways to suppress wages is non value added under capitalism. For example, Company A is more effective at blocking Unionization attempts because of its depravity, while Company B is Unionized or pays higher wages to its workers resulting in a competitive disadvantage. Company B products and services are much better; however, due to Company A aggressiveness in keeping wages down, it is able to under price its competitors and attract capital enriching shareholders. In either case, Company A has not added any additional value to society by producing innovative products or services, or developed a process to improve productivity.
A minimum wage or other mechanism to improve living standards of employees would level the playing field and establish minimum living standards. It would force companies to focus their efforts on other methods to increase profitability such as better products or improved production methods rather than wasting efforts such as buying off politicians, firing workers for organizing.
Let say we applied a minimum wage to all companies instead of Slavery in the South, this would force companies to develop tools such as the cotton gin to gain a competitive advantage and boost profitability, rather than use slavery. In countries with strong laws protecting employees living standards, productivity is much higher than low wage countries. Instead of wasting their time keeping wages down, they are forced to innovate with productivity to gain an advantage.
Instead of fighting minimum wage laws or offshore to a low wage country, Why don't companies focus their effort on developing their cotton gin? Lets establish a worldwide minimum wage of $15 and force companies to compete based on productivity or development of better products. The auto and steel industry which are highly unionized were forced to compete based on productivity and rapidly develop many new technologies to automate rather than chasing low wages. Automation can turn low skill, low wage jobs into high paying, high skilled jobs producing these machines to boost efficiency.
Slavery was abolished a long time ago, yet the cotton gin is still around boosting the productivity of harvesting cotton.
There are many good companies and jobs that go out of business, not because of bad products or low productivity, but their decision not to race to the bottom with wages by offshoring or paying workers substandard wages. They did not engage in this non-value added activity, that does not benefit the consumer at all.
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