I've definitely shared this concept or observation or whatever you want to call it before, but recent events have made me think of it again. I should clarify first that what I base this train of thought on isn't entirely something that clicks for me, something I might not get into expressing, but it definitely makes you or at least me wonder why the implications in the train of thought aren't considered, at least outside my occupation (since I'm in an occupation designed to work around the otherwise neglect of the concept), and I thought of running this by.
Back in the old days, it was common for business people to pay their workers more honestly, as in based on what they thought the worker seemed to deserve. Often the workers would seem underwhelmed. Organized criminals would then step in and say "you'll get more out of us" and so that part of society grew. For some reason, the first thing within the mind of the people in charge, trying to assess everything, was "let's invent this thing, we might call it the minimum wage". Alrighty. So this side thinking, what do we think of it? Something happened, right?
So here is where the train of thought works into the picture. Matters of monetization are just one arena up the sleeve of bad actors. A lot of people feel abruptly socially isolated. When this happens, instinct is often to seek out companions. Social life might be dead or people might be avoidant. Someone I know is in such a situation. Along comes what might be called a bad actor. To them, they might see a potential extension of themselves with freedom of minimal effort. And voila, someone new joins the "bad crowd" or "dysfunctional crowd".
Watching this unfold myself, I think to myself. Places have a "minimum reference point" for the topic of exchange/payment/whatever the word is, so then what does the non-thinking come from to apply this thought to the whole isolation thing mentioned? Anyone here have people they know who were absorbed into a bad part of society when everything seemed dead and thought "well, it's not like anyone else was going to give them what they need"?
Okay let's game a scenario, I own a mobile coffee cart. I need somebody to push the card around and sell coffee to people. I find somebody to push the card around and sell coffee. And I pay them x per day.
How do I also provide for their social needs? As a coffee cart service, I can't provide a break room, the employees are out on their own beats. What would this social structure look like?
Well... the social problem described does/would remain. The execution of the response though is another story. It should be noted the IRS (or whatever the equivalent is in other places) oversees a lot of that business stuff, and that level of things often overlooks matters of wage on a small scale, which here might include the coffee stall thing. So it wouldn't be alien to chalk up the oversight you bring up to the business type, even if it's not something anyone looks forward to.
My occupation is very conceptual in its nature, it's inspired by and one might say connected to a company in Israel called Personal Heroes, which people might know by their explanation of themselves of being to charity what criminal records are to crime. Before I moved to where I am now, they, in a possible effort to maybe make the world a better place, attempted to brainstorm a construct that would act as a makeshift answer to everything I mentioned, along with the already-existent aspects of itself which were inspired by Personal Heroes. It's the kind of thing you might see on Shark Tank or Dragon's Den, even though they were never consulted, and such things often go through several drafts/revisions/restructures. The current way it works for us in this part of the occupation is that deals are made which create incentive which is then channeled into a call to combat the bad influences I mentioned by removing their low hanging fruit, which involves competition. In a way, it could be compared to a hookup service if it was with a business model. It works though in a rather rickety way.