>The market didn't think so. If you think you're worth more, you have to push for it, since the market can't read your mind argue on your behalf. The biggest i

>The market didn't think so. If you think you're worth more, you have to push for it, since the market can't read your mind argue on your behalf. The biggest issue is price discovery and knowledge of wages. There's not a stock ticker that everyone follows for "X-language Developers" getting hired at a particular price. Such a stock ticker would be dumb because too much goes into pricing people's work, but it highlights that there is more going on than you are able to discover, and some feel that's an unfair market because the businesses employing most people hold the cards in their favor. If it's a private company, you can't see their financials to see if they're telling the truth when they can only afford $X. It's only with time and effort that the cards start going to your hand, but to get there, the market might have already taken advantage of your underpaid work (that you agreed to, ignorantly or not). The market has the power to lie and collude to lower your price if you don't hold these cards. I, too, have the power to lie and collude to increase my price. And while most of us should just simply strive to be indispensable, discovering indispensable skills is also a lot of work. If I wanted to truly maximize my price, I would have to apply to every job available to me (time-consuming because we don't have a product for this) at every single company I could legally work at world-wide. Then I just pick the highest paying one that would hire me. That's a pretty easy concept, but no mechanism like that exists in the job market, and for that reason, it's a pretty terrible market to find your price. >Since they don't get it, they're upset, so they try to make laws to mandate everyone gets X That is a form of negotiation and that's what they did in Seattle. Just because I won't play my boss's game doesn't mean there isn't another game I could play. This shouldn't be surprising, but even political lobbying has risks of not winning. Now, if businesses want to come back and try to argue that this is hurting them, then that's part of negotiations as well, and it's entirely possible that businesses can convince Seattle's population.