[coldtea]

In the perfect world of the auto-correcting market.

In real life, in the case of coal miners and their "dead work" (necessary work that wasn't getting paid), it took bloody strikes and fights to get those rises, the amounts paid weren't automatically upgraded.

The "money required to attract X workers" only plays a role when those X workers are not destitute and starving to begin with. If they are, and the company can pay them less and still have a huge profit from their work, it'll do that.