> this isn't a wage floor, it's internalizing the costs that the service imposes on the rest of society.

This isn't an externality, this is the market price of labor. Some labor has a high market price, some has a low market price. We draw a socially constructed line of what it means to be "at the minimum". There's no guarantee that all labor will be worth that minimum value, how could it? That means every service that you could possibly outsource to another individual, from cleaning your house to unscrewing a light bulb...would cost $15 / hour (or some hourly rate that society collectively determines). This is, by definition, a wage floor.

> Why should the taxpayer have to jump in to save gig workers who are essentially living in a permanent state of precarity? Why should we encourage companies who cannot take care of their employees? Or for which separating themselves from obligations is actually their entire business model?

You can make this argument about literally any welfare system. Why should the taxpayer have to jump in to provide single-payer healthcare? By doing so, we encourage companies who cannot take care of their employees by providing health insurance. Single payer healthcare is a taxpayer subsidized way of absolving corporate responsibility over its employees. We both probably disagree with this framing.

The obligations of a corporation's business model maybe SHOULDN'T include the provision of health insurance, in the same way that it maybe SHOULDN'T be in the business of providing a "minimum standard of living" that we collectively come up with. The business's role is to simply provide goods & services based on the conditions of the market.

> It's completely cynical to suggest we need a 'robust social welfare system' which in this context means tax payers taking on the obligations of employers so that a bunch of tech workers can become millionaires at the age of 30 after an IPO, which is what Uber is. It's a distribution of money from the bottom 80% to the managerial and tech class while offloading risk onto the public and creating an underclass of disposable gig workers whom the company has no stake to ever invest in.

You're just talking about Uber here, but this line of argument applies to literally any business that makes use of any labor whose market value is below the "minimum line" that society draws. Think about how high McDonald's share price will go if we institute a taxpayer funded Single Payer healthcare system. It would essentially be a distribution of money from the bottom 80% to the managerial class of _any_ corporation that is currently obligated to provide their employees health insurance.

Which is why I made the more fundamental, industry-agnostic argument: We as a society (rightly) try to guarantee a minimum standard of living, and we can do that either by employing wage floors, or through raw welfare — we collectively pay for it in one way or another. The moment you institute a wage floor, for any kind of wage: food worker, transportation worker, etc — we collectively pay for it through price increases, which doesn't discriminate against the buyer. A low class consumer experiences this the hardest, the middle class consumer the next hardest, the upper middle class the next hardest. Who cares the least about this price increase? The billionaire. It's essentially a regressive tax.

This line of thinking applies not just to Uber, but local businesses, fast food joints, grocery stores, anything that requires manual data entry — really any low-skilled labor.

EDIT:

I've found it helpful to visualize what this looks like with a concrete example:

Imagine a pizza maker's market value is (say) $5/hour. They are able to produce (for simplicity's sake) 5 pizza's per hour, or $1/pizza. Including other operating costs + 3-5% profit margin (that's the average for most restaurants), let's say that the pizza sells for $5. Thus the pizza maker can expect to earn $40/day, on the market. Suppose the "livable minimum wage" should be $15/hour, or $120/day. There are 2 ways to guarantee this:

A) The government deposits an extra $80 to the worker, allowing them to make $120 that day. They can buy a pizza for $5, which is about 4% of their daily wage.

B) The government mandates a minimum wage of $15/hour, which means that the labor portion of the pizza cost goes up from $1 to $3 per pizza. The pizza now sells for $7 so that the shop doesn't go out of business. The worker makes $120/day, and can buy a pizza for $7, which is about 6% of their daily wage.

Notice that in (B), the worker is actually worse off, even though they have the same amount of money in their pocket. The worker has to pay a higher percentage of their pay to afford to eat, but this $2 extra means absolutely nothing to a billionaire, it's pennies to a rich person. In scenario (A), the worker is better off, and the welfare system that sustains it can be funded through progressive taxes, which targets rich people.