Your labor is worth what your labor is worth. If you don't like the value of your labor, you can seek to increase it (training, education, etc.) or use it for yourself instead of auctioning it off (though this presents its own set of challenges and is not a guarantee of being better off). If you artificially force a higher cost for that labor then you end up pushing the price of the product or service being produced beyond what people are willing to pay (at the very least, you decrease demand). Increasing wages increases costs which increases prices. There's not a simple one to one ratio here as there are a variety of other cost, supply and demand issues but artificial manipulation of prices never works out well. It's been tried many, many times. In a highly successful economy, those at the "wage slavery" side of the equation are minimized which is all that you can ever hope to do. Fixing prices is not the way to a highly successful economy. A free market is the way to a highly successful economy though in the U.S. we are far from having such a market. Having said that, very few workers, if any, are starving.