Low income taxes are good for employees and very lax labor laws are good for the company, but both aren't good for the employee and the company isn't affected by the former.
Edit: Citation provided below
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...
California has some of the best and smart people but the Government of California has been nothing but a disaster on all fronts - crime, cost of living, ease of business, upward mobility, public transportation, the entire gamut.
Citation needed.
The one that started out less fully industrialized, because of the opportunity to import technology and make catch-up gains, as one would expect if labor laws had no contribution.
That point isn't that labor laws are bad. They save a lot of lives. But if you have a lot of laws that stifle productivity, such as (important) OSHA laws, it's natural that wage growth will be stifled as well.
For instance, truckers would make a lot more money if our labor laws let them drive more hours per day, or at a faster speed limit. But we don't let them do that and therefore their productivity and wage potential are capped.
There aren't going to be any citations about this, because there's no point in studying it. It's just plain old deductive reasoning.
Furthermore, for many white collar professions, which are among the main productivity boosters and growers, time spent on the job is counterproductive past a certain point.