Before minimum wage laws people lived in hovels and worked to their deaths too. I suppose getting rid of rules on worker safety would help bring back industry too, but at what cost?
Bringing back an employed but wretched class doesn't seem to me a particularly helpful answer to the economic problems we face.
First, just because you happen to exist does not mean you have a right to employed, employed at specific wage or work in a safe environment. You have a right to attempt to find those things but no right to impose your conditions on others. If you do not like the conditions then do not work there. It is obviously not your best option so go do whatever your best option is. Find a place more agreeable to you.
Second, the more regulations and taxes and artificial sundry costs placed on labor the more it costs to hire people and thus the less of them that will be hired. When there is a surplus of labor and thus a lot of competition for jobs employers need not attract workers with higher wages or better conditions. In a labor surplus the employers have the upper hand.
However, lower the costs of employment and more labor is hired, drying up the surplus labor and thus if a new business wishes to start or an existing business to expand they will be faced with a labor shortage which means in order to entice folks to work there they have make an offer that is better than what the workers are already getting. For instance in some places in North Dakota some many level positions are paying $10-11
to start and some are as high as $15 which is more than double the mandated minimum wage. In a labor shortage the workers have the upper hand. And the wages go up and conditions, where possible, get better.
So if you were truly concerned about workers you would want to remove all artificial costs to the price of labor.
The Democrats (and clueless Republicans), in the main, do not do this because they believe, as you do, that freedom in labor pricing would lead to lower wages and thus make high-wage unionized employees less competitive which would piss off said unions. And since unions give a lot of money to Democrats they rationally do not want to upset that apple cart. Also they can still count on many, perhaps most of, the votes of the unemployed as things other than wage laws can be blamed for the labor surplus; overseas competition and greedy businessmen who are no friend of the working class. Plus, they can keep these people mollified with welfare benefits and agitated when the Republicans move to make even tiny changes.
It's a two-fer for the Dems, they get the unions AND the people out of work (plus Nativists) because of the labor restrictions so it would be insane of them to change their direction on this.
And back in the past, they had the racists as well for minimum wage was a way to drive out blacks from jobs that whites "should" have. Since blacks were not well liked and could not get hired at the normal wage they had to compete for jobs by lowering what they would work for. Racists job-givers have a price at which it is too costly to engage in their racism and thus, when the blacks got to that point they would be hired.
Along come minimum wage laws and everybody has to be paid the same. Now a racist job-giver gains nothing by hiring blacks and so does not and the jobs go to whites.
So congratulations dude, you are on the side that prevents economic expansion, keeps people from earning more money and tends to keep poor working conditions from getting better and promoted (the effect of which which is still in effect today) racism and turning people from independent dignified individuals, to state-dependent drones. Good job.