If more people simply said "no", that wouldn't work for companies. Even so, I doubt that employers can afford to be that picky. If they could, everyone would be getting minimum wage. Everyone getting above minimum wage obviously has leverage.
Just say "no"? And do what? Lot's of folks are supporting others, or need to support themselves.
"Sorry my sweet daughter, no cancer treatment this week, I said no to that job."
I have 0 clue why you think picky === minimum wage. It just means suppressed wages, which is highly documented. Even the big tech companies had agreements not to "poach".
That's why they organize into political groups and manipulate wages on the nation-state policy level.
Owner vs. worker power struggle is always all about who can better coordinate collective action. Owners have an inherent and mostly dominating coordination advantage.
> Cartels try to deal with this by making compliance required by law.
That's what I'm saying.
Except you have the wrong idea about stability, because the law itself is the cartel, and very stable.
> It's not a power struggle. It's supply and demand.
It's not supply and demand because it's about which side coordinates better!
Supply and demand, the labor market, and markets generally, exist within parameters determined by political collective action. The big owners generally get their way but there is some democratic pushback.
I'm not thinking of things like non-poaching but things like tuning the level of social benefits in order to control the supply of labor.
If the workers get too powerful, they starve them one way or another.
Back in the early 20th century the socialist radicals had ideas about making one giant union of all the workers. If they could coordinate every industry they could negotiate for everything!
The Labor Management Relations Act of 1947 (aka Taft-Hartley) made all such ideas quite simply illegal.
If unions get too powerful, unions will be hobbled.
If the market fails to deliver exploitable labor, the market will be fixed.
