The usual justification is that wages are "sticky" - that people really don't like it when their employer decreases their wage, taking it as a comment on their

The usual justification is that wages are "sticky" - that people really don't like it when their employer decreases their wage, taking it as a comment on their worth, leading to a bad work environment, etc. So when a business finds that their product isn't selling as well at the moment, they can't easily avoid bankruptcy by just cutting their employees' wages. Similarly, when a worker is becoming less productive with age, cutting their wage to make employing them still profitable is hard to do. Solution: Just have everyone's real wage go down 2% a year, unless the employer specifically raises the wage to compensate for inflation. Supposedly, people are too dumb to realize that not raising their wage when there is inflation is the same as decreasing their wage when there is no inflation. Maybe they are that dumb - I haven't looked at the data.