It’s complex. If there was a method for collective bargaining, maybe, but illegal union busting is extremely common and the government agency that enforces that stuff is purposely kept underfunded, so enforcement rarely happens, and because the fines are less than the money they save by union busting, it’s still worth it. Not to mention, there just have never existed unions in “professional” industries like tech. A few have started to pop up but they have had very little luck taking hold due to the union-busting efforts and propaganda. There really is very little middle class in the US anymore, so most people live paycheck to paycheck and missing one or two checks can leave you homeless. And there are very limited safety net programs in most of the US.

So, companies constantly create cycles of layoff and over-hiring that are coordinated across industries either with direct collusion or just because companies know that when the stock market in their industry goes down, that all the other businesses will be doing the same thing. So, people who have just been laid off are desperate to survive and when you just lost your ability to pay for rent and food, plus lost your medical coverage, and are no longer able to contribute to retirement which social security and Medicare programs no longer are guaranteed to be around in a decade, and there’s only a few months of unemployment benefits which give only a percentage of your pay which was already not enough to afford rent, assuming that the companies don’t illegally pretend that your layoff was actually “for cause”, which has happened to me, and thus making unemployment benefits unavailable, then people are willing to accept less pay each time they change jobs. And most employers no longer offer annual raises that keep up with inflation, so even if you stay with a company for a long time, you end up making less and less over time. And if you quit to go find another job, you have no safety net at all in most states.

Add to that the extreme un- and under-employment in the country which is not tracked because people who are unemployed for more than a certain period of time are assumed to not want work and drop off the statistics and underemployment is not really tracked. But gig-work is so common now that underemployment is extremely common. So, the competion for jobs that are full time is extremely high.

Then look at the extreme homelessness issues that people see constantly and fear becoming. And then consider that publicly traded companies are pressured by the system to increase short term profits at the expense of long-term growth, so there’s no incentive to keep a loyal, experienced workforce and every incentive to treat employees as “replaceable cogs”. And the fact that many companies have policies against or at least generally consider it to be a fire-able offense (even if not on paper) to tell coworkers how much money you are paid, so without collective bargaining, there’s often no way to know what you’re being paid less than fairly.

All of this, and several other factors lead to a job market that generally has every incentive under capitalism to not pay fairly across the board. Sure there are a lot jobs that pay well in tech, finance, etc., but they are the exception that everyone is competing for. So the companies have the power without collective bargaining in place as individuals have very little control over how much jobs pay.

Anyway, it’s complicated, but workers in the US generally have very few options for employment and have relatively unstable jobs that they rely on to survive. Plus little to no enforcement of the few regulations there are around employment mean that the vast majority of workers take what they can get just to have food and shelter.