A salary is paid in exchange for an employee's time, which implies that when management has employees sitting idle or otherwise misdirects their energies, the s

A salary is paid in exchange for an employee's time, which implies that when management has employees sitting idle or otherwise misdirects their energies, the salary is what it costs to continue doing so. But I would not characterize a salary as the cost of wasting an employee's time--just the cost of their time. But you seem to suggest that ceteris paribus, a market salary is the minimum for which a similarly employed person would be indifferent to being kept idle. Perhaps this holds for a small interval dt. I lack the intuition that employee preference matters.