[ChrisLomont]

I've gotten multiple jobs in life where I was able to negotiate a much larger salary then they had intended to pay due to being of more worth to them once they interviewed me.

So that would be done away with? No thanks. I'm happy that people have varying skillsets and that employers can pay more or less for a posting based on the person they choose.

[ouid]

I think you're guilty of falling prey to the "decoy effect" here. The labor market is a carnival, and they're selling tokens to you. You can buy 25 tokens for 10 dollars or 15 tokens for 5 dollars. The latter strategy is locally optimal, and you are using that as an argument for it's global optimality. That's exactly the point of the con though. Companies DO NOT want to bid on labor, so they'll use whatever trick they can to avoid having to do it.

[ChrisLomont]

>Companies DO NOT want to bid on labor, so they'll use whatever trick they can to avoid having to do it.

Workers also do not want to work cheaper than they can get, and last I checked, there's over 5 million companies in the US, and plenty of evidence that those companies are competing for labor.

So they do bid on labor. If a company does not match it's competitors, employees move. And a company has every incentive to pay more than competitors, up to the break even point, since it gets them better employees.

Even if a few companies collude, it open the door for a competitor to break ranks and steal employees. This breaking of ranks is prevalent in all sorts of cartels around the world - it's nearly impossible to make companies stick to an agreement when by breaking it they can gain advantage over rivals.

The carnival metaphor makes little sense. Employees and employers are in a market trading goods, nothing more, nothing less.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

No, he's not. That's what gets lost in the shuffle in discussions like this. He is saying it works for him and like it or not, that's what the vast majority of people care about. What's In It For Me?

[ouid]

No, that's a mischaracterization of my argument. The decoy here is the lower salary that was the supposedly "market rate" salary for the work he does. That price wasn't advertised publicly in a central market for job listings, so it's an unrelated third option that is dominated by his current strategy that drives him to believe that his current strategy is globally optimal, despite tremendous evidence to the contrary. He would make more money if he could sort job listings by offered salary.