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Comment by s0rce | Hacker News Reader

Many companies don't have sufficient margins to raise wages. Hopefully this isn't confused as me endorsing subpar wages, simply that those business can't be sustained or will just endlessly be looking for someone willing to work for cheap because hiring someone for more will actually cost them money. They may be better of turning away some customers vs. hiring someone for a higher wage to support more demand.

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Many of the businesses pleading poverty have execs making millions a year - funny how there is never any issue awarding huge bonuses for the top brass, but the cupboard is always bare for employees.

Seriously if we stopped letting a dew parasites at the top leech all the money out of businesses we wouldn't have this problem. We have entire C Suites getting overpaid while the people who do the actual work can't even afford to live where they work.

Something's gotta give.

> Many companies don't have sufficient margins to raise wages.

Not too sure how you came to that conclusion. Profit margins for many companies in the UK seem to have actually gone up [1]. You probably assume that companies are subject to perfect competition. That might be true for small businesses but is not really the case for large firms [2]. Some large firms practically are the market and can get away with employing few people for low wages. It's similar to a monopoly that is incentivised to sell few goods at high prices.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-britain-antitrust-idUSKBN...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony

One effect of inflation is to reshuffle the economy toward bigger, higher-margin firms. The companies without sufficient margins to raise wages will simply go bankrupt. This reduces competition in their industry, which gives surviving firms more power to raise prices and pay those higher wages.

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