Everybody in a business is creating the wealth of the business, and they get their share of the created wealth in the form of pay and benefits. Unsurprisingly, their compensation is in proportion to the value they add (i.e. the wealth their contributions create).
It is not a system based on forcing anyone. The cooperation is voluntary, with their compensation set by supply+demand.
Power imbalance does not make for informed consent.
But they aren't. Only 1.5% work for minimum wage.
1/100 and 1/1000 is different, but the difference isn't that big.
Your overall point didn't make any sense though. "Lots of people don't earn minimum wage" doesn't mean that there isn't any power balance.
There is no power imbalance. If a worker produces a lot more value than he costs, he simply goes to another company that bids higher for him.
People who don’t work for minimum wage are still facing the same basic constraint.
That's clearly not true. It's just ussually very hard to quantify how much wealth every individual is creating and it becomes even harder as you go up the chain of hierarchy.
> Unsurprisingly, their compensation is in proportion to the value they add
Well... that's a strong statement and generally incorrect, at best their compensation if bounded by the value they add (not that it's easy to measure in most roles). Supply+demand (as you said) is what determines compensation in 95%+ of all cases.
Supply+Demand certainly does determine employee compensation. But consider that there is no demand for workers who would cost more than the value they add. If the worker was producing far more value than he was paid, then the worker will be enticed away by some other business offering him more money.
So, you can see how S+D nudges employee compensation towards being paid according to what value they produce.
In general yes. But as as some of the venture capital funded growth companies have shown us in recent years these values can stay detached for quite a while.
But yeah over longterm I'd you to be mostly right.
Its missing, because it is mostly not true.
The wealthy predominantly get wealthy by getting other people to create wealth, and taking it from them via contracts relying on imbalances of power and econonic coercion (in a fairly benign modern capitalist system; is less benign, less modern, emerging (or pre-) capitalist systems, the coercion is often jist direct threat or application of force rather than the economic coercion of the inherent precariousness of the working class in capitalist society.