workers don’t have to be paid the minimum possible
Ideally, the market dictates salary in capitalism. This means that a worker can shop themselves around if you are not paying them enough. Where this has broken down a bit is in corporations intentionally and unintentionally colluding on appropriate pay for positions across an industry. The get consulting groups to indicate whether they are in line with industry practices. This can also result in employees getting pay bumps if a company has is having trouble retaining talent. If the government tries to break the organic model by imposing minimum pay rules, then it will hurt small businesses. If it creates a percentage system based upon company profits then you end up having your talent retire early. It is not really a tenable model to keep a business afloat. You would end up with these companies that exist and then go away because the employees have extracted all the wealth they need, so you wouldn’t have prolonged enterprises like Amazon that offer an extremely useful service because their wild success means that it becomes impossible to figure out how to hire people to new positions because the revenue share for one employee would far exceed what other companies could offer, so you have to somehow either find the best person ever for that position or some kind of hereditary system forms. The use-case doesn’t make much sense. If you simply cap the CEO’s salary and say that they are not allowed to make many multiples of standard employees and standard employees cannot make many multiples above the standards for their roles in the industry then maybe that would work, but it seems like an overreach of government.
Ideally, the market dictates salary in capitalism. This means that a worker can shop themselves around if you are not paying them enough. Where this has broken down a bit is in corporations intentionally and unintentionally colluding on appropriate pay for positions across an industry. The get consulting groups to indicate whether they are in line with industry practices. This can also result in employees getting pay bumps if a company has is having trouble retaining talent. If the government tries to break the organic model by imposing minimum pay rules, then it will hurt small businesses. If it creates a percentage system based upon company profits then you end up having your talent retire early. It is not really a tenable model to keep a business afloat. You would end up with these companies that exist and then go away because the employees have extracted all the wealth they need, so you wouldn’t have prolonged enterprises like Amazon that offer an extremely useful service because their wild success means that it becomes impossible to figure out how to hire people to new positions because the revenue share for one employee would far exceed what other companies could offer, so you have to somehow either find the best person ever for that position or some kind of hereditary system forms. The use-case doesn’t make much sense. If you simply cap the CEO’s salary and say that they are not allowed to make many multiples of standard employees and standard employees cannot make many multiples above the standards for their roles in the industry then maybe that would work, but it seems like an overreach of government.