An applicant has as much job-related gambling when they take a job as the employer, especially when the job can just fire you. When applying, you have no idea if the management is terrible, if your particular manager is terrible, if the projects you're going to work on are terrible, if the procedures and standards for working on a project within the organization are stupid or will penalize your style of work, if the job will have high expectations and skimp on resources, whether your new company sucks at hiring and all your coworkers are going to be terrible...
Calling it a crapshoot on both sides is a pretty empty statement. When it comes specifically to compensation, the applicant is David and the company is Goliath.
Employee compensation is based on the value they provide to the company. Equity owners are compensated for the risk they take. I don't see any essential correlation between the two.
For example, if you pay Bob $10 to go to the store and buy a lottery ticket for you, and you win the $1m jackpot, do you owe anything more to Bob than $10 worth of value he provided? Let's say the ticket was a dud. Do you therefore owe Bob less than the $10 you promised him?
Prices are a function of supply and demand, not “value”. I pay very little for very “valuable” life sustaining food because I can get it cheaper from multiple sellers.
Sure, and in order to correctly value something, you need to know the relatively real time price history to infer how supply and demand curves are moving.
Not having that information means you will ascribe the wrong value, which means society is not allocating resources properly.
Your example is not relevant to this conversation because we are not talking about retroactively changing negotiated prices.
Labor prices stagnating relative to equity owners’ gains has to do with supply of labor vastly increasing due to globalization, and simultaneously, automation reducing demand for many types of labor.
Having transparent prices will help better inform labor sellers which labor markets have excess supply and which need more labor, in a timely fashion.
And they don't have access to accurate information on what value you can generate, either. It's a crapshoot for both parties.