Is it good employer strategy to pay my employees just enough so that they can’t save money, so that they can never walk away from the job?
Like, there is a threshold where if they are able to save X per month, they will eventually use that against you and quit at an inopportune time?
And if that threshold falls below state mandated minimum wage, what steps can be taken to mitigate this?
Nope, it’s a terrible one. Everyone will be constantly looking for new jobs. And would do the bate minimum to not get fired, that’s the contract you’re signing, bare minimum pay for bare minimum work.
Regardless of what you do, it’s likely that you’ll need multiple times the amount of employees to get shit done, because one dedicated employee is worth several doing bare minimum, depending on the job some works simply won’t happen because no one gets paid enough to do them.
Besides that you’ll suffer brain drain, i.e. anyone good enough will leave you, and they won’t accept a raise to stay because if someone offered them double their salary and you tried to match it they would immediately see the bullshit you’d put them through and know that the only way to get a better pay again would be to get a new offer from someplace else.
Anyone bad enough that other companies don’t want would be stuck with you, but there’s a reason other companies don’t want them.
You wouldn’t be able to pull any new talent, you’d get stuck just getting people no one else wants because they’re the only ones willing to work for that low.
Nobody has really answered the last part of my question. I’m not asking whether or not this is ethical, I’m asking how can I keep the employees who don’t leave in a state of perception where they think I’m ready to fire and replace them at any moment. I don’t want them to realize their position and leverage it against me.
I’ve been thinking about holding the promise of upping wage by a dollar and to keep pushing out the date as means of helping them realize how easy their work is. I’m not going to allow non-committed hires to devour the value of my business over what amounts to easy work. They know it’s easy work.