I would agree that pretty much everything is all relative, yes, but when you're just throwing money at people and you're still finding it difficult to fill a position, or ~3000 at a rapidly expanding company and they tell you that all you have to do is show up and you will be trained on what to do.... I would be on the side of that people do not want to work then that something is wrong.
Unless what you are saying is that what is wrong is that people do not want to work. If you're talkin about $12 an hour at McDonald's then yeah I can totally understand why somebody would not want to work that but when you get into higher dollar amounts and many many bonuses and incentives referrals and things like that then you're going more towards the direction of that people do not want to work no matter what
I can only speak for what I can see, in the 120-300k pay scale side of things:
1) 2 of my senior engineers retire, 1 got retained as part timer pay by the days, I don't know how much he got paid but it is probably a compromise for his stress level vs his past pay, maybe a good compromise and he doesn't have to work unpaid overtime anymore yet still qualifies for medical benefits. The other one was stressed out that he was "promoted" to management after someone else quit to do the boss a favor, but then when the staff keeps leaving he ended up having to work extra to cover it, and boss tolerate lower level people to work less because "they are not paid enough for the workload" and threatened to quit. Since he was well off, kids grew up, he just decided to quit and not retained as expert, big loss to our team.
2) 2 guys went to a prestigious company doing completely different things, throwing our domain knowledge out the window because it is no longer in a field that makes a lot of profit. They are now paid 50% more, will never come back ever again.
3) My former boss went to a social networking company and no longer manage people, just projects and programs, and get paid probably about 150k more, closer to home as well.
4) About 10 lower to upper middle management got fired due to performance and cost issue a few months ago, then last month an upper management got fired, and 2 years ago the CEO and later his team of VPs / Presidents got fired due to running our company as a dividend no grow borrow money to do stock buyback, yet no career growth company.
5) 1 new grad quit and instead of making 100k (just a barely living wage here) and went to a company that pays him about double after stocks and bonus. He asked me before he left how long would it take to get to 300k, I told him I'm not even there yet, so don't come back and congratulation, hook me up when you settle down.
So I am not sure if we are a "we still find it difficult to fill a position when just throwing money at people" company. We certainly were market pay but other companies from other markets are doing better and paying way more to move people out of our industry, and the upper management pride themselves in underpaying us for at least 1-2 decades. It is now coming back to bite them.