>People who are not worth $15 an hour because are slow are artificially inflated, and now they get put into a job that is hard to fire from, which then in turn

>People who are not worth $15 an hour because are slow are artificially inflated, and now they get put into a job that is hard to fire from, which then in turn leads to companies less likely to hire people, which decreases labor supply, and has other cascading effects. To be fair, plenty of huge companies hire all kinds of people that provide zero or negative value to the bottom line. Most of these positions are white collar, well paid and non-unionised: purchasing officers, university administrators (with the exception of that one person who actually does everything), sprawling HR departments, "Agile" project managers that can't code, the "management class" as a whole etc. Interestingly, the more "dead weight" employees a company has, the faster they will hire more. Using your own brand of "individual actors maximising value" economic theory, it's pretty easy to see how this is the case. The people making these hiring decisions don't actually have any rational incentive to increase the profitability of the organisation, but will receive both increased job security and political power through appointing dead weight hires. So that's what they do.