Most employers might be small business owners, but that doesn’t mean at all that they provide the most jobs. One reason why small business owners have such a hard time generating a profit is that big companies undercut prices to destroy smaller local businesses. So we are kinda in the same boat here and shouldn’t be at each others throat.

Yes, I have. And yes, labor is expensive. Running a small business is hard, and not always profitable. You should do it if you are passionate about the work, and can do it better than the big corporations. If you depend on cheap labor for survival, you’re going to fail, and you should fail. Your larger competitors can afford to operate on smaller margins by doing larger volume. Beating them on price and margin is a losing battle every time. Exploiting desperate employees is not a business model, it’s just opportunism.