The Market Rate

The market rate is not necessarily livable or in any other way rational and just.  Really, it is just the normalized amount employers are personally willing to pay in a given area at a specific time.  Sometimes it is equated with an average of what other employers in a similar business pay, meaning that some of the wages or salaries are even lower than the supposed rate.  Either way, that the "market" pays only a certain amount does not mean that the work does not deserve more simply because it is professional work or because of the nature of that exact role.  This alone is unlikely to deter employers from acting as if whatever minuscule compensation they offer is somehow significantly better than what one would fine somewhere else.  Often, this vague, unspecified amount is just presented on job listings as "competitive."

A wage or salary being better than that of a competitor requires nothing more on its own: it is better, which in this case means larger, than the competitor's wage or salary.  It might be genuinely horrible, which necessitates that the competitor's lesser offering is even worse.  The lower compensation offered by the other company might be so abysmal that almost any amount would be better, so superior pay does not automatically mean excellent or even adequate pay, as some employers might try to mislead applicants into thinking.  Higher standing relative to another similar example is not the same as something being good itself.

The philosophy and actions of one abusive employer—for paying anything less than livable wages is exploitative—are not legitimized by the fact that another employer is more abusive.  Yet the similar range of employers' willingness or unwillingness to pay are somehow considered the proper criteria for whether the compensation is adequate and just.  Hypothetically, all employers in a region could even actively collude to keep compensation low, even if it means giving the outward perception that they cannot afford to pay more when this is far from the case.  Small businesses in particular might be helmed by people who like to complain about how there are not enough resources for raises, or at least not for everyone in the company.  This changes nothing about how anything less than livable compensation is exploitative in itself.

If an employer cannot truly afford to pay workers enough to live, they need/deserve to go out of business or to remain/revert to a sole proprietorship if that is all they can fully fund (which would diminish the scope of the work that can be taken on).  The basic threshold of whatever is livable—not what barely permits literal continuation of survival despite immense financial difficulty and the stress stemming from it—is not some pragmatic or Biblically suggested option that need not be ensured.  On top of the baseline of the bare minimum necessary to survive in a certain place and time without sacrificing stability (this is what the genuine minimum wage would amount to), factors like experience and skill would proportionately increase the fitting compensation.  In my country at this time, even years of experience and immense skill would probably not get the typical worker to the point of being offered enough by their employer to live without sacrificing stability of one kind or another!

The criteria for the market rate, in either case, are not valid.  Someone's willingness to pay a certain amount or their degree of conformity to social norms has nothing to do with whether what they are willing to pay is morally and otherwise legitimate.  Probably, they want fully invested, cheerful workers who go above and beyond when they are not even paid enough to live comfortably, and that is if they have the chance to perform almost any outward activity besides the likes of eating, showering, commuting, and sleeping when they are not professionally working.  The market rate is an arbitrary social construct that some employers use to actively oppress workers while hiding behind the excuse of the arrangement being normal throughout an area.