Our labor market is completely different. There is no loyalty between employee and employer anymore, so job switching is far more frequent here. The hiring cult

Our labor market is completely different. There is no loyalty between employee and employer anymore, so job switching is far more frequent here. The hiring culture is similarly bonkers: you have to apply to dozens or hundreds of jobs to get a callback, even when unemployment is low and employers are whining to anyone who will listen that it's hard to find workers, even for low-wage restaurant and retail positions. Employers take a long time (days, weeks, months) to get back to you, they interview you multiple times, and they ghost you entirely at every stage of the process. Imagine going through this, just to be told "You're hired, and the wage is $x/hour", where x is far less than you make now or would need to pay rent. Salary transparency laws are necessary because workers, especially lower-wage workers, have finite time and cannot go through this process and receive multiple offers. Employers can hold out for desperate workers, but workers need to eat and pay rent, and are thus forced to take what they can get. In this hiring culture, lower-wages workers are often forced to work for far less than they could otherwise get because of the high time and effort cost of finding better paying work.