The issue isn't pay itself but companies not knowing how to operate with higher wages (i.e. how to economise on labour usage) and not knowing how to deal with tight labour markets.

In agriculture, you have farmers complaining about no labour whilst they are failing to use machines that could replace the labour (and, unf, agriculture in the UK has turned into one massive IHT avoidance scheme...so most of the operators are clueless). In retail, you still have companies doing multi-day interviews with logical reasoning tests, team-working tests, problem solving exercises for shelf stacking positions (which, btw, they are getting people to do for free with no training on welfare-to-work programs).

I am not sure if I agree with the original post. Is it completely off though? No. Not at all.