>If you think there are workers out there whose productivity is $26/hour, but who can't find work at more than $15/hour, then you can truly disrupt the market and hire all these workers for $20/hour and become rich.

How? If their productivity is $26 / hour but their market rate is $15 / hour, by paying them $20 / hour you'll just post lower profits than companies that pay them market rate.

The workers will leave all the other companies and work for you, so those other companies will be dead in the water and/or stuck raising their own workers' pay to compete

At least, that's how it was supposed to work in theory.. Now that we see people out there going for improved wages/jobs in line with good capitalist doctrine, the business owners are all screaming in rage about a "labor shortage"

Yeah, but there's a soft form of collusion going on. If we live on an inescapable island of 1000 people, and I have 200 jobs, and you have 200 jobs, and Bob has 200 jobs, then the fact that you and Bob pay twice as much doesn't matter. You guys only need 400 workers, total. Those 600 other workers will be left to compete for the 200 jobs I have.

I still get to name my price. And once you see that I can undercut labor costs due to this, it makes no sense for either you or Bob to continue paying twice as much as I do.

And let's not pretend that if you don't have the very best workers, you can't compete. First of all, you can't identify the best. You hope to get lucky, but in reality, you're going to be paying not the best, but those adequate enough to perform the job reasonably well.

COVID assistance has changed the game. Because before, the choice was to have a job or starve homeless. You'd take almost anything in desperation. Remove desperation and people stop acting desperate.

Yeah, I'm really optimistic about the labor market now

This is the first time I've ever seen restaurant workers, delivery drivers, etc taking charge of their own careers the same way Silicon Valley tech workers do.

All of our laws and safety nets are designed around the idea that people will act in their own rational self-interest and hop jobs when it suits them, but I never saw that actually happening until this last year.

I'm pretty sure Walmart would prefer to post higher profits than to drive the local hairdressers out of business and have more job applicants than they know what to do with.

You could, if you also had access to the same assets that the employers paying $15/hour do.

Practically speaking, it's relatively hard to enter into a market and outcompete existing firms for labor without a significant amount of capital to offset the existing assets of the employers you're competing with.

The other downside is that it can initially leave a business more vulnerable to a bad economy in the same way corporations buying back shares can make them more vulnerable. With that said, the solution is to slowly increase wages while also building a sufficient amount of capital to weather an economic downturn.

And at the end of the day, anything that went into business expansion and/or profits could have gone at least partially to higher wages instead.