I hear this all the time in Vancouver - people blaming this squeeze on stagnant wages - as if the labour market could ever pay people enough to keep pace with supply-constrained, monopolistic markets. The rent is too damn high. And we know why, but ... somehow we just want to throw more money in the fire? You can pay people however much you want, but without addressing the market dysfunctions all of those higher wages will wind up in the hands of landlords and health insurance companies.

It is not. The value fire-fighters, teachers or nurses provide is much higher than, say, an enterprise developer, yet in most places the other earns more.

The same seems like it's true of teachers and nurses. They're seen as a cost centre to be reduced rather than a scarce resource to be fought over.

And it's not really fair to nurses to say "you only get a fair wage if you're putting in 60-80 hours". It's also not fair to their patients, as care quality drops pretty hard when you over work nurses and doctors.

If that was true businesses wouldn't show profit (or would show low profit margins consistently) because the value of the workers labour would have been been paid back to them.

Plus that whole thing about these billion/trillion dollar SV tech companies engaging in massive wage fixing.

You're paid the absolute minimum amount of money the company thinks they can get away with.

It should be but employee efficiency and revenue per employee has increased (in fact more than doubled on average in the last 20 years), but salary has roughly stayed the same.