The one unquestioned service of the minimum wage law is that of diagnosing the evil of low wages rather than in remedying it.  The minimum wage law brings to light the industrial incapacity of particular individuals to earn a living wage.  The direct remedy is to abolish the incapable workers or their incapacity by such methods as regulating foreign or cityward immigration, custodial care of the physically, mentally, and morally weak, vocational guidance, and more effective measures of industrial education.  Alongside of the abnormally low paid occupations or elsewhere in the industrial organization are other occupations in which with, or often even without, special training, the sweated workers could get, competitively, more than the minimum wage, if they could, or would, qualify for the work.

Sec. 11. #Mediation and voluntary arbitration#.  The labor controversies in which the public has the largest interest as a third party[10] are those which result or may result in strikes.  The public interest becomes acute when a strike results in interference with the individual freedom of other workers and of nonparticipants, when it causes a blocking of the highways and disturbance of the peace, and when it prevents the regular production and transportation of the commodities which the public consumes.  The public, therefore, has steadily become more interested in all methods and agencies designed to conserve better relations between employers and wageworkers, and to diminish or, if possible, to do away with strikes when individual and collective bargaining between the two parties fail.

Mediation, or conciliation, is the effort of a third party to get the two parties to a trade dispute to come together to agree peaceably upon a settlement.  Mediation may be voluntarily undertaken in a particular case by any citizen or by a public official, usually the executive (mayor, governor, or President); or it may be by a regular public state or national commission charged with this duty (as in some 17 states).

Arbitration is the decision, by a disinterested person (or commission) to whom it is submitted, of the exact terms, after a provisional settlement of a dispute.  It is voluntary when the parties agree in advance to accept the verdict, and compulsory when they are compelled by law to submit to arbitration and abide by the verdict.

Some provision either of voluntary private or of public agencies to mediate between the parties in labor disputes and to facilitate voluntary arbitration has been made of late in most communities of the civilized world, including 32 of our states, and the nation as a whole particularly in respect to disputes between railroads and train operatives engaged in interstate commerce.[11] No one objects to them, and they accomplish much good, but fail oftenest in the greater emergencies because of the unwillingness of one or the other party to submit the case, or because of lack of any power to enforce the decisions.