When choice for one side is hunger vs giving up labor, and the other side is a tiny bit more profit, or a tiny bit less profit - that’s not a choice.

Power imbalance does not make for informed consent.

If you were right, everyone would be working for minimum wage.

But they aren't. Only 1.5% work for minimum wage.

Let's look at the top 0.1%. An Amazon Senior SWE makes 1% and minimum wage in CA is 0.1% of the $35,000,000 per year that someone in the top 0.01% makes.

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.

A senior engineer can be worth a lot more than $35M. Even just shaving 1% off the time that the server software consumes are worth many millions of dollars to the server company. The server companies compete for those people, so they get paid lots of money.

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.

I'm sure just on this thread you'll find a ton of engineers who have saved their company millions of dollars, but they're still paid the generic wage everyone else is.

I’m not claiming market forces don’t exist. I’m just stating that earning wages is a completely different mindset than “some profit” vs “some more profit”.

People who don’t work for minimum wage are still facing the same basic constraint.

> Everybody in a business is creating the wealth of the business

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.

The job of a cost accountant is to quantify these things. If the business gets it wrong, then the business does poorly or even goes out of business.

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.

> But consider that there is no demand for workers who would cost more than the value they add

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.