Work performance?
> Arent market forces the ultimate invisible hand of merit?
No. The price system is very efficient at certain kinds of allocation, but not in all or even most cases.
> I mean literally any worker can gove notice and change employers, it is at will employment on both sides.
Only if you have enough savings to survive without income and/or you can easily find a comparable job, which is not even true for many high-wage tech employees anymore.
> You enjoyed it during great resignation, where IT workers would jump ship every year and get 50% raise.
Yes, that was temporary.
> You realize labor union will put a hard stop on job hopping?
It won't, because it currently doesn't. This is not at all an established phenomenon.
> You will have to work for the same company for decades with 1.5% pay raise at best! Imagine working for sweatshop amazon for a decade lol
This simply isn't true. Even labor unions that struggle to negotiate with management are doing better than 1.5% over a decade. I'd be interested to see some data on this, but I'd bet that median union-negotiated wages are rising at about the same rate as median non-union-negotiated wages (read: slower than inflation). I say "median" and not "average" because there will be high earners who have seen huge pay increases recently that would skew the mean upwards.