The general notion of minimum wage, which is a legal instrument that regulates the labor market, hides a radical difference. First expressing a compromise between capital and labor within the framework of a collective bargaining process, it then, in the context of the neoliberal hegemony, turns into a techno-economic and administrative imposition, a pronouncement. In this article, with the help of the political theorist Chantal Mouffe, I examine three mechanisms which allow to comprehend, in concrete terms, how neoliberal hegemony expresses, justifies and affirms itself in the particular and essential field of minimum wage. These mechanisms generate the exclusion of what, politically, is a source of antagonism or even controversy, and bring forth ways to validate and reproduce such an exclusion, either cognitively or morally.