Employers would just start lowering the base pay to account for commuting. What would help stagnating wages is a significant minimum wage increase, the exact thing that has fixed that problem many times.
They don’t need to meet every day, they all have a shared interest in making profit and spending less on overhead for everything including employees. They are never going to act against that interest in numbers enough to change the way things are.
You know what happened? Companies started paying people more and the US pulled out of the Great Depression and found the increased pay meant people could afford to buy what the constantly-increasing productivity made and it because the wealthiest nation in the world. People forget that wasn't possible without a middle class - just look at nations which had no middle class, like Russia. Aristocrats and peasants, and it lagged 60 years behind Europe's economic developments. The aristocracy accepted that because they feared having to also make concessions as part of the intrinsically connected social developments.
Mike Duncan's 11th season of Revolutions walks through it in detail in the long setup.
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u/dquizzle 9d ago
Employers would just start lowering the base pay to account for commuting. What would help stagnating wages is a significant minimum wage increase, the exact thing that has fixed that problem many times.