Wages are sticky and employers have gotten used to paying a certain rate for employees and employees have gotten used to be paid that rate. If Google wants to

Wages are sticky and employers have gotten used to paying a certain rate for employees and employees have gotten used to be paid that rate. If Google wants to try to cut that rate, its likely that someone else who is hungry for Google engineers (like Facebook which is going full-time WFH) will be willing to pay that rate (also understanding that they have some terrible PR issues and will need to pay a bit higher due to that). That is likely to cap how much Google is actually able to do this if someone can phone up Facebook and get an immediate >20% raise over what Google will "calculate" their pay should be.