Jimmy McNulty:
Think its further up the food chain where the consumer demand for lower and lower prices drives down prices throughout.
But consumers are the most numerous entity in the market and the least organised - they take whatever prices are offered. When was the last time you went into a shop and told the manager “these prices are too high, you’re going to have to cut wages”? 
It’s not a conversation that consumers have with retailers - not least because such mental engagement in the mechanics of the marketplace would quickly lead consumers to realise that they are also workers, and what they gain on Saturday morning in cheaper prices will be lost on Monday morning in reduced wages.
The only time consumers bargain is in sectors where there is a large mark-up, and they understand that they are bargaining over the amount of profit the seller receives on a single (often a wholly discretionary or luxury) purchase, not bargaining about the overall economic settlement between the workers of an industry and its consumers.
When bosses say consumers are forcing down prices, they mean other bosses are forcing down prices by setting up new businesses or outlets and choosing to offer cheaper prices for the same goods - whereupon those same bosses say the workers then have to accept wage cuts to pay for the reduced prices.
Or alternatively, if wages are being attacked in general in order to boost profits and returns on capital, and therefore the amount of money most consumers have to spend in the economy is being reduced (most consumers having only earnings as their sole source of income), the bosses will say this must be responded to by further wage cuts (which will ultimately exacerbate the problem, unless those with unearned income make up the consumption which earners have lost, which they rarely do, because most unearned income is saved and reinvested, not spent on personal consumption in the same proportion as wages are).
The reason why unearned income is rarely spent as fully as wages are, is because those who have appreciable unearned incomes tend to be wealthy and already able to meet their personal consumption needs fairly fully (if they aren’t wealthy enough to live decently, then the temptation arises to spend and draw down on the capital, which reduces the unearned income, and eventually they are forced into the position of being a pure wage earner who spends 100% of wages).
The already wealthy who are not forced to spend their capital or all their income on personal consumption, are typically looking to enhance the amount of capital they possess which forms the basis of unearned income - this is not just to protect the real value of the capital against inflation, but also to provide ballast against the loss of the unearned income, to further reduce the amount of time they need to spend earning (if any) in order to afford their standard of living, and possibly to provide other members of their family with similar unearned incomes.
To put this into terms most people will understand readily, if you have £100,000 in the bank and receive interest (which is a form of unearned income, but not the only kind), firstly you need to retain some interest each year add to the £100,000 to maintain it’s real value against inflation, secondly you’ll try and put even more away in order to protect against a possible future reduction in interest rates or other risks, thirdly you’ll try and increase the capital so that eventually the unearned income means you don’t need to work any more, and fourthly you’ll try and put even more away so that you can eventually give your kids access to unearned incomes (as well as continuing to draw one yourself).
But when the economy is suffering a crisis of mass consumer spending (caused in the first place by the retention of too much capital and the existence of too many unearned income claims), this will exacerbate it. The main driver of the current crisis is the amount of debt that exists in the economy, where large proportions of earned incomes are being transferred to lenders and rentiers, not spent on goods and services.
For every buy-to-let landlord, for example, who is ekeing out a bit of unearned income from a few properties, there is typically a bank behind them who are getting a steady 5% a year on the amount lent. And predominantly, that 5% is not spent by the recipients but if it is retained by the bank then it goes searching for new borrowers, or if it is passed to shareholders then it goes searching for new shares to invest in, always tending to be stored and reinvested in greater overall proportion than do wage-earners with their wages.
Businesses that depend on economies of scale and mass markets then collapse - you can’t build a modern large car factory, for example, and offer cars at reasonable unit prices, if the only market you can cater to is the super-rich. And bespoke, luxury operations tend to employ fewer people (because they create fewer units) and have to recoup the fixed capital investment (made in car design, factory equipment, marketing, etc.) from a smaller number of units produced (meaning that prices are far higher relative to the value of each unit, and that in turn puts them out of reach of far more people, making the available market even more niche).
The upside was that I didn’t go short of work, although I did get henpecked a few times to work some days in a week I actually wanted off, for no particular reason…
