Here is how a free market ecconomy works,
If you are an employee then you are not sitting on the top rung of the ladder, generally speaking the people that are sitting on the rungs that are higher than your rung thoes people have more business sense than you or they have better connections than you have.
When people protest to recieve a signifigant pay raise, what is going on is that people are thinking that they will make the person on the top rung of the ladder go broke and he/she will slide down the ladder.
But the truth is that generally the people above you (on the ladder) are smarter or more experienced than you. So if most of the employies at McDonalds recieve $1 more per hour, then the guy at the top has to pay out 1 million more dollars per day. Because we are looking at a capitalistic society, the guy at the top will just raise the price that everyone needs to pay to eat at McDonalds. And alot of employes will be fired and replaced with machinies.