Whether this has a positive long-term effect on the company and its employees is a secondary consideration. Often the effect is negative. As for Greenspan and the Federal Reserve, they ignore almost all of this. Meanwhile, a weakened and under-funded SEC has encouraged mergers and acquisitions, many of them destructive. But one of the most egregious flaws in Fed thinking has been its focus on wage inflation at the expense of other indicators.
Wage inflation is far from the only cause of an inflationary economy.
And exploring the Department of Labor's web site shows an inappropriate emphasis on the cost of labor rather than the well-being of the work force. These days the Department of Labor is the national equivalent of your company's human resources department, aiding the strip-mining of the workforce on behalf of employers. Meanwhile, economists blithely say that service-economy jobs can take up the slack, and that the economy will turn around by Q4 of 2001. I hope they are right, but I think they're wrong.