Drivers group plans work stoppage at Uber, Lyft in NYC

For example, when major employers are large inefficient bureaucracies with high margins, raising the minimum wage doesn't result in those entities laying off many if any workers, because they can just eat the cost and keep going as if nothing changed.

But when the employers are lean and operate in markets with high elasticity of demand, as in this case, it does directly result in unemployment. Because there is no way to pay more without charging more, but charging more reduces demand.

Notice that this is another way of saying that minimum wage has more negative impact on efficient companies than inefficient ones, which I take as another argument against it.

Again, this sounds like a welfare problem, because if we instead redistribute money to these folks (expand EITC and even remove the employment requirement), then they have the leverage necessary to negotiate better pay and better conditions. Such workers can walk away from unsafe working conditions without worrying about being able to feed themselves. Higher paid workers do this all the time, and this feeds into the market price for certain labor.

Most of those laws are not very useful, because the practice was already on its way out, but also not very harmful, because the practice was already on its way out. (Notice that there is also a major distinction between "worker protections" which workers can generally negotiate for themselves, and laws pricing externalities like pollution, which really do need to be there to keep companies from doing that.)

The problem in this case is that paying low wages isn't actually universally harmful. In many cases, prohibiting employees from working for lower wages only prohibits them from working at all, because no one will hire them for more than that. Moreover, the benefit is quite attenuated because the difference for the workers who did receive higher wages is still not dramatically more than they would be paid in the alternative, and even they are a very small percentage of overall workers, the large majority of which make more than minimum wage to begin with.

It's not clear that giving a small raise to a small group of people is actually worth causing another group of people to lose their jobs, while raising the prices that everyone has to pay. Particularly when there are alternatives for subsidizing compensation that spread the cost more evenly instead of concentrating it on the exact people you don't really want to tax in general.

Compare this to a law requiring saws to have blade guards on them, which costs hardly anything and has no apparent major negative consequences at all to anyone.

But employers just pass that cost onto the consumer. This results in, in effect, a regressive tax, because these higher prices are paid by the rich and the poor alike.

In contrast, using welfare to ensure that these workers don't go hungry ensures that the workers essentially end up with the same amount of money as they would have with the wage floor, but having the rich pay for it disproportionately (via progressive income/capital gains taxes).