An aside that's probably relevant here is how the welfare state here deals with the unemployed: if you refuse a job offer, you cease being eligible for any welfare. This can (and does at times) push people to accept jobs where their cost of commuting takes up almost their entire income and leaves them worse off than the relatively small amount they were getting as welfare.
In a sense, you can be pushed to accept a job at an infeasibly low wage because the alternative is having no income at all.
In the transaction though its the 'job' that is the good thing and employers (in spite of their whining about worker shortages) are able to get people to work at those insufficient wages, and so they continue to pay them.
Unionization broke that cycle once, I'm curious to see if a technology worker union emerges from this growing level of pain.