[angry_moose]

It might be part of the feedback loop, but from my experience it always starts at the company level.

I think I've been under a pay freeze for 4 of the last 6 years, and a capped 2% raise one of the others. No matter how much effort I put in, my wages would have stagnated.

[jmalicki]

The effort you could put in would be to switch companies

[foobarchu]

Thats kind of part of the problem, though. Yes, switching jobs constantly is a solid path to higher wages in fields like tech (at least it was before this year, some of the most competent people I know are struggling to change jobs), but in my experience that act tends to reduce ones number of "give a damns".