This comment made me think a bit. There is some minimum level of wage + benefits that a worker needs to survive. And the tendency is for wages for unskilled wo

This comment made me think a bit. There is some minimum level of wage + benefits that a worker needs to survive. And the tendency is for wages for unskilled workers to fall to exactly that level. In other words wages + benefits = bare minimum living expenses. So that supports sanders statement. In that case, if you start giving people benefits, they will just displace wages. BUT, your statement that increased benefits give leverage to workers to demand more pay also rings true. If the worker can simply quit, and go looking for a new job, without becoming homeless, then that’s leverage. So that would increase wages. I think maybe both are true but in different situations: if you start at zero benefits, and start adding benefits, at first wages will decrease in equal measure. But then once the benefits become great enough that the worker can live on them alone for some period of time, it starts to push wages back up again. That would be my guess as to what’s going on.