Won't the market sort out whatever this is?
Is there a specific unfair mechanism at play that would prevent supply and demand from finding its balance?
Is there a specific unfair mechanism at play that would prevent supply and demand from finding its balance?
This puts you at a major disadvantage.
And then there is the problem that a company can easily outwit and outwait you as they have a big buffer.
Only people currently in stable jobs or with plenty of f.u. money can match it.
If there is a slump in demand or peak in worker supply you will have even less bargaining power.
I'm on the supply side of the labor supply-and-demand curve. I set the price that I'm willing to sell my time at. Nobody else sets my price, and I don't set anybody else's price. On the demand side, there are a bunch of employers who each have their own price for what they're willing to pay for a certain set of skills. Each sets their own price. Nobody else sets it for them. In particular, nobody on the supply side can possibly set the price the demand side is willing to pay.
Now, all of what I just said presumes a functioning supply-and-demand market. It breaks down if there's collusion between employers, or in a single-employer situation. Unions may well be needed in such situations. But in a working labor market, demanding more than market price for labor will result in lower demand for labor.
A worker on supply side only has very limited resources to figure out how valuable the offers are.
A person cannot really "not be hired" for prolonged time unless they're already rich. Most cannot tolerate unemployment for even a short time. Even students who don't have many commitments cannot do so for too long.
Only for very small companies this is somewhat true.
Likewise, employees have the ultimate influence on salaries once they have enough leverage in the job market.
A company hiring is like a person finding a job: they only have to once for a long period of time.
A company paying a salary is like a person working a job: they have to do it constantly.
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You can say the cards are stack in the favor of employers, and they sometimes are, but remember 4 out of 5 businesses fail. Four out of five individuals do not go bankrupt.
The balance is that in some ways, we have economy-wide collusion-by-default to keep wages artificially low. I know this sounds ridiculous, but I think we've hit the point of increasing returns on job growth depression.
When one looks at the rate of underemployment and the employment rate writ large, it seems like the number of jobs is just few enough that the pay doesn't have to go up, regardless.
Furthermore, many industries don't seem to really pay attention to using wage as a lever. Often, this is because individual companies have difficulty justifying hiring someone at 20-30% more than their counterparts, and their counterparts haven't received a significant wage increase in years, often decades.
When combined with the rate of inflation not being matched by wage growth, it begins to look "normal" to many employers that wages should be particularly low.
For example, if women don't apply for jobs unless they meet 100% of the listed requirements [1], and men are much more willing to fudge it, that means this particular market won't clear in a fair manner. This hiring data isn't public, so a company won't lose sales over it, so the market can't correct it on the other end, either.
And that's probably not the only way to slice the set of job-seekers into people who will/won't apply for a job based on the requirements. Essentially, impossible-sounding criteria do filter your set of applicants, but not by the criteria you claim to care about.
[1]: https://hbr.org/2014/08/why-women-dont-apply-for-jobs-unless...
Toronto, Canada: all job offers when I was unemployed were advertised+2k. All job offers while employed were at least 5k over current salary (and up to 20k).
To assume that markets sort everything out is folly. Nature tends towards entropy.