> Huh? I'm pretty sure they have to pay you a salary to keep you employed.
That is pretty much in the definition of employment. However, what is not in the definition of employment is how much salary they pay you.
> If they won't pay you money until you do X, then the money is payment for X, not payment for previous work, even if they try to market it as "deferred" payment for previous work. Gotta be clever enough to see through the doublespeak.
Right, but the "gotta do X" in this case is, "still come in to work".
> Future salary: you will get this only if you keep working, if you quit you will not get it.
So that part isn't true, as many people have recently discovered. Your salary can be cut, either explicitly or implicitly by inflation.
> The whole concept of unvested RSUs is basically a clever psychological trick to exploit the endowment effect to make quitting seem more punitive than it actually is.
I think you misunderstand the value of RSUs. The trick you are listing above could be handled just as simply with "bonus cash payments". RSUs have other attributes beyond the simple endowment effect.
> If you trick people into thinking their $1 million of unvested RSUs is "already theirs" then they are more averse to quitting and losing that $1 million then they would be to quitting and losing the same $1 million in future salary.
I've never seen that play out. If anything, I've seen, relative to their value, people pay more attention to their future salary than their future unvested RSUs. Pay someone more than their market rate in salary, and it becomes amazingly psychologically difficult for them to step away from the job.
> That's obviously not true, since people in RSU-ville switch jobs all the time, which they wouldn't do if the new job weren't at least matching their old RSUs.
You may not have seen it, but I certainly have... first hand.
There's this reality that as you get farther away from the time of issuance, if the company is growing and doing well, the value of the RSUs go up. It can consequently become very difficult for a prospective new employer to match the value of the RSUs, as they effectively become worth more than the market value of the employee's skills. The employee might hope that new employer RSUs can similarly grow in value like the ones they have from their current employer, but the same growth could happen with their extant RSUs. This is a key aspect of how RSUs can be different from "future salary".
The key to golden handcuffs is that they get tighter as time goes on.