I"ve seen a lot of employers minimize wages and hours to get as much of their budget into workers pockets as possible. It converts into productivity more efficiently like that.
(Tax here in NL is 39% with a discount over the first 8k or so)
How would that work? The tax bands are progressive, so you will never get less money from a higher salary and tax rate. That would be pretty dumb.
[1] https://www.slideshare.net/kevinkmac/welfare-failure
[2] http://nebula.wsimg.com/92d8ac7d5aaf3b2df9d4dfaaddcde435?Acc...
[3] https://georgiaopportunity.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/GC...
I read it as “better for the employee”.
That's only if you assume minimal cost in having more people doing the same amount of work. Between hiring, HR overhead, training, team communication, number of desks, and a general need of staying on top of things, that might be a steep assumption. If twice as many people don't get the work done twice as fast, why would twice as many each working half as much do it in the same time as before?
Of course, I'm thinking of engineering here. I can imagine that employing several part-time workers in, say, a retail store won't have the same level of drawbacks.