You're mixing up two very different things. One is the hourly pay for a worker. The other is the total cost of a worker, including training, pensions, equipmen

You're mixing up two very different things. One is the hourly pay for a worker. The other is the total cost of a worker, including training, pensions, equipment, everything. It's not a metric that usually talked much about, but it is an important metric, which should obviously be lower than the value created by the worker. Workers in a lot of fields cost 2-3x as much as their paycheck, but they create the value to offset that as well.