[theRealMe]

It’s pretty simple, really. There is “wink wink nod nod” collusion going on across the industry to suppress wages right now. They know that if everybody else is suppressing wages right now, they can without too much “trouble” as well.

Their calculus is just “how low can we keep wages without too much attrition”. Knowing that they have the backdrop of what feels like “always imminent recession”, it gives them a lot more confidence in holding wages down. Similar to how some (but by no means all) inflation was caused by companies knowing that since other companies were raising prices, they could also raise prices because consumers were already primed to think it was inflations fault and necessary.