Of course it’s a value judgement! The mere fact that care workers are paid minimum wage or just over is what the market will bear. The same market that is in our society.
It’s not a value judgement on care workers or teachers. Our societal values are embodied in the fact that we operate a market based economy. So we’re onto a whole new academic debate here, big vs small government.
For the government to intervene and set wages for certain professions means that individuals in power are making value judgements on professions. So rather than being an automatic function of the system it becomes a personal judgement. If you don’t agree with those people then this starts to become problematic.
In order to set wages you’d have to effectively nationalise the care industry, but why stop there? You’d have to nationalise a lot more if you’re going to be fair and consistent. Now personally I would rather certain things be nationalised, but as a nation we did this once and then we voiced our unhappiness through the ballot box.
I think it’s fairly easy at this point to blame Thatcher.