Subject: Re: Dividends
I appreciate your attempt to teach me economics, but your example bears no relationship to reality and doesn't even work out mathematically. How can a worker generating $10/hr in value demand $55/hr in wages? Even if this was an entirely worker controlled enterprise, it would go out of business in a week.

We agree!
Yet it happens all the time, for sure, at every pay level. If you live in a rich country, there are probably people within a few miles of you getting paid today more than the demonstrable economic value of their work. There are some amazing contracts out there, which is the original discussion, and also sometimes jobs that simply don't produce value at a rate higher than the local minimum wage.

There aren't as many places like this as there used to be, because the (for example) well paid US manual workers who had negotiated such deals are finding their jobs drying up. For the reason you cite: the firms don't do well in that situation, so they look to find a cheaper way to get the same task done. The simplest solution in the last few decades was to outsource the task to someone in a different place (city, state, country etc) where the same work could be done for lower wages.

Greedy workers in Detroit are not the cause of global inequality in wages. The wage pie is not static, it can grow both through global gdp growth and through a more equitable distribution of income between capital and labor.

This may all be true, but it is emphatically not the point I have been making. The discussion of the split between capital and tax and labour is a worthwhile one, but not the one I'm talking about today, it is entirely unrelated.

Consider for a moment the division of the labour pie alone, whatever size it may be at the moment. The observation is the simple fact that some employees demand high wages, and some don't. There is no need to be judgmental about it. Because goods (and services) are vastly easier to transport than they used to be, there is a large levelling effect going on. The people in the low-wage towns are getting paid lots more, which is really great, and people in the high-wage places are getting less, which sucks for them. Some of them were getting preposterous amounts due to quirks of history, and that wasn't ever going to last. My original point is that their position was an untenable one destined to go away, and that they are mistaken thinking that they have a "right" to their traditionally disproportionate share of the labour pie.

For the subset who are definitely not producing as much value as they are charging, the global pie will be bigger if they go do something else.

I am not trying to "discipline" the American working class, just pointing out that some pay traditions were always nonsensical and consequently destined to go the way of the dodo. Besides, people are people everywhere. If I'm going to make the leap from merely observing the situation to expressing an opinion, it would be that a bit more pay equality is probably a really good thing.
https://ourworldindata.org/gra...

Jim