I dont see how my example was stupid, it illustarted that not all employees are paid the same salary by their employer and that even new employees can earn more than longer standing employees.
Blagsta is employed and is paid a wage. His employer no doubt feels that he is paid the market rate because he is doing the job for the renumeration on offer. If Blagsta secures a higher paid job then he will have a valid argument that he is worth more money in the market and a payrise is likely to be forthcoming if his employer values him enough to want to keep him. If his employer thinks that in the current economic climate he can secure the services of a new employee for less than Blagsta is asking for he will wave goodbye to Blagsta and employee a cheaper worker, Supply and demand. QE fucking D
You've appropriated the words from an academic subject. But you have clearly never actually studied the subject that you are riding on the coat tails of.
If you had, you would know that the market for labour is qualitatively completely different to the market for goods. There are at least two reasons why: constraints and contracts. Essentially, the things that make up Blagsta's responses to you date.
Yes, there is a supply mechanism operating in the marketplace, but it is the supply of a single indivisible and unique individual on a long term contract with no ready comparitor. And yes, there is a demand mechanism. But that demand is fluid and highly constrained. If you think you understand it by simply parrotting "supply and demand" then you have a lot to learn.
Start with taking the real world -- the world that involves rules, contracts and human constraints, such as frictional costs that are extreme when it comes to labour (one of many fundamental differences to the market in goods) and move from that to the model of the marketplace. Don't make the ludic fallacy (of which you are guilty) of starting with the model and assuming that reality must fit it.
The long-term contractual wage-worth of an individual is complicated and has a lot more study devoted to it than can be summarised by the simplistic reductionism of your post above.
(And if you don't believe me, I challenge you to build the mathematical model of your simplistic approach and run it through an economic model and see how well it copes with the real world. And if you *can't* to this, you have no business telling those who can what constitutes the right economic model for this purpose, because it means you really don't have a clue how supply and demand actually works in the real world at all and are just using the words because you think that makes you clever)
