I would be interested to hear the arguments that posters here would make if they were in charge of a firm that did analysis and found that they were paying labo

I would be interested to hear the arguments that posters here would make if they were in charge of a firm that did analysis and found that they were paying labor costs in gross excess of the market rates needed to retain employees. How would you justify that to shareholders? Put it another way. You are a firm that needs steel as an input. You can buy identical steel for $1000/ton from supplier A, or $800/ton from supplier B, who saves on costs by locating their steel mill in a cheaper geographic area. Would you say, actually, that's not fair to supplier B, "same steel same price"? No, of course not. An even better (more direct) example is that of offshore IT labor costs. I would expect anyone here arguing for "same job same pay" would support equal (100% of SV pay) for any offshore labor their company employs, all else being equal with respect to individual labor output. I get that people aren't used to thinking of themselves as participants in a market for their labor. But unless we want to do a revolution or something I don't see this going away. In fact, it's only going to get worse, because as remote work becomes more and more normalized the competitive advantage of "locality" will erode entirely and you'll be competing in a global labor marketplace, with potentially much slimmer margins. Disclaimer: I'm someone who recently joined a large tech firm and saw my salary location-adjusted pretty significantly. It still blew away my previous compensation with local firms.