> Companies may now have a direct incentive to have their lowest income earners be outsourced/contracted
The median was presumably chosen because it's relatively harder to shift in this way. Although this depends on the exact pay distribution of your company, you'd expect getting rid of people from the bottom to change the median person but not typically change the median value.
(This is also a mature enough problem that I'd expect other provision in the law to prevent this - are we sure it doesn't include outsourced workforce pay?)
I bet it's actually easier to change the median. Often you'll scale a sales or support team (much lower cost than engineer) and these teams can often balloon especially if the company has a direct positive margin on their work (generally the case in sales). Now, 30% of the company is sales/support and there are quite a few options for outsourcing your sales team to a "professional sales company."
The median was presumably chosen because it's relatively harder to shift in this way. Although this depends on the exact pay distribution of your company, you'd expect getting rid of people from the bottom to change the median person but not typically change the median value.
(This is also a mature enough problem that I'd expect other provision in the law to prevent this - are we sure it doesn't include outsourced workforce pay?)