I'd rather have a committee made up of my fellow workers and co-owners determining my salary than a boardroom full of suits who only care about profits and have no idea what the job actually entails or what I need to survive and thrive.

The "invisible hand" thing is a myth. This is obviously a big subject, but for starters:

https://hbr.org/2012/04/there-is-no-invisible-hand

Maybe you've been lucky enough to get to make your own decisions regarding pursuing and staying in a given career or occupation, but for many, that's not really the case. Many people take whatever low-paying jobs (often more than one) that they can find to scrape by, because those at the top don't deem their position worth a livable wage. Most of those people will never have the money or time to pursue an education, and even if they could, that is increasingly less helpful. There are whole families that have become stuck in this kind of situation, leading to generational poverty.

There is really no such thing as a free market, the question is who controls it? The few people at the top who deem their occupations more valuable, to borrow your phrase; or the workers and the greater society? Worth noting here that the people who sit at the top of the current system don't actually have occupations, they just gamble with other people's money. If you consider what you yourself are saying regarding executive pay, you seem to be acknowledging that the system needs regulation.

Another thing I would point out here is that you seem to be fixating on this middle income bracket as if the problem is people making a few hundred thousand a year, and worker co-ops would mean we all live in poverty. There's something like eight people who control half of all the world's money, and we're talking about sums that their great-grandchildren would still be trying to spend if they stopped bringing anything in and just went on lifelong spending sprees. Where does the invisible hand come in?

My suggestion had nothing to do with people being willing to do the same job for less money. My suggestion was only that those people could remain in those jobs. It would be fair to say that those at the very top would have to take a pay cut, but that's hardly asking anyone to actually suffer. That's also another oversimplification, because the real discussion is about changing things at a deeper level. Rather than basing our system of value on manufactured scarcity, it should be based on what people actually need. Not to say that we can't have luxury, but there's clearly something wrong in a system with more empty houses than unhoused people.