Except, of course, that this is completely backwards. Low unemployment shifts the balance of negociating power towards workers as companies have to compete to get them. See the massive growth in AI engineers’ wages for a nice illustration of this.

High unemployment helps employers because they can put pressure on the workers, who are less likely to find a job with better conditions or at all.

The fact that low unemployment is associated with stagnating wages these days is a massive failure of the capitalist system. It means that the situation is deteriorating and some of the levers cannot be used. There is no way out without pain.

This is my bad. For some reason I got "unemployment rate" twisted in my head and thought it was related to the number of unfilled jobs

So my reasoning was "if there are not many unfilled jobs, it makes it tougher for people to find work, meaning the unemployment rate is low" which of course does not logically follow

My mistake