tl;dr Depressed wages are better explained by employers' ever more powerful bargaining position
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....which is dictated my the supply of employers
thanks for the tldr.
Except it isn’t, it because of the way labor and employers have different costs when an employee leaves, meaning each side has a different equation for how important it is to not sever the employment arrangement.
If an employee loses their job, they lose 100% of their income, and for many they are unable to survive this. If an employer loses an employee, they only lose 1/n of their production, where n is the number of employees they have. They can handle that reduction while they look for a new employee way more than the employee can.
That is what prevents the market from being efficient.
> That is what prevents the market from being efficient
The problem is, nobody really wants labor markets to be efficient. Efficient labor markets mean that we would pay workers the subsistence wages, because, why they should be paid more?
That's the thing, labor is not like other commodities, say apples or computers. You want to make the price of other commodities to be as low as possible, and everybody (all humans in society) wins. But for price of labor this is not true.
That isn’t true; an efficient market doesn’t imply that we will pay workers subsistence wages. Market rate has nothing to do with what a person needs to survive.
The rate would be set based on competition with other employers for employees; you pay enough to keep a worker from getting a job at another employer.
So the answer to the question, “why would you pay more?” is, “so they don’t start working for someone else instead”
Now, the market system doesn’t work for employment because of the reason I stated in my original comment, but it isn’t related to the ‘minimum wages needed to survive’
That assumes all employees are equal which in any non-factory-churn-operation company is not going to be true.
Even if all employees aren’t equal it will still be some fraction of total productivity that is lost, which is always going to be less than the 100% lost by an employee.
That's only part of the equation. Survival often necessitates taking a sub-optimal deal. Employees are very more likely to be forced into this position than an employer, who can often survive with reduced staff.
I don't think you can assert that S&D is the only factor, certainly labor law has an effect on the bargaining positions
That's very naive and narrow.
The power of monopolies is actually inversely proportional to the "supply" of such entities.