American companies are suppressing wages for many workers

Food always seemed a pretty free market to me, even though it's necessary. I was taught that free market is more about competition and access to information while necessity of the product mainly affected price inelasticity but that was econ 101 so idk if it's entirely accurate.

How utterly pathetic that a company like Jimmy Johns, whose employees probably make single digit per hour salaries, would do this[0]! This is just one more way the rich crap on the poor.

[0] I realize the article said they stopped, but I still can't help but be very upset about it.

Shopping for groceries might be close to a free market, but the production of food certainly isn't.

Also, a big problem with the "free market" is inability and/or disincentive to price externalities, such as environmental damage. Although, it still seems to be a better system than others, we need to work on that front.

The linked article mentions outsourcing, but it was this other _fantastic_ article [1] on the structural issues of the current wage economy that really helped me understand just how different things are:

"Thirty years ago, she says, you could walk into any hotel in America and everyone in the building, from the cleaners to the security guards to the bartenders, was a direct hire, each worker on the same pay scale and enjoying the same benefits as everyone else. Today, they’re almost all indirect hires, employees of random, anonymous contracting companies: Laundry Inc., Rent-A-Guard Inc., Watery Margarita Inc. In 2015, the Government Accountability Office estimated that 40 percent of American workers were employed under some sort of “contingent” arrangement like this—from barbers to midwives to nuclear waste inspectors to symphony cellists. Since the downturn, the industry that has added the most jobs is not tech or retail or nursing. It is “temporary help services”—all the small, no-brand contractors who recruit workers and rent them out to bigger companies.

The effect of all this “domestic outsourcing”—and, let’s be honest, its actual purpose—is that workers get a lot less out of their jobs than they used to. One of Batt’s papers found that employees lose up to 40 percent of their salary when they’re “re-classified” as contractors. In 2013, the city of Memphis reportedly cut wages from $15 an hour to $10 after it fired its school bus drivers and forced them to reapply through a staffing agency. Some Walmart “lumpers,” the warehouse workers who carry boxes from trucks to shelves, have to show up every morning but only get paid if there’s enough work for them that day.

“This is what’s really driving wage inequality,” says David Weil, the former head of the Wage and Hour Division of the Department of Labor and the author of The Fissured Workplace. “By shifting tasks to contractors, companies pay a price for a service rather than wages for work. That means they don’t have to think about training, career advancement or benefit provision.”"

1 - http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/poor-millenni...

Free market means you're free to choose, where you work, what to buy, where to sell. Its not free from consequences. You can most definitely not provide your labor, go and start a self sustaining farm ( you probably only need 1 - 2 acres of land in the right location )