Ok, first principles, premises. Say you have a corporation. The economic model consists of your guzintas and your guzoutas. Your guzoutas include various things such as cost of merchandise, overhead, taxes (don't pick nits with corporate welfare here, keep it basic), advertising, debt service, etc, and labor. Your guzintas are investment income and sales.
Until and unless you can buy back all the stock and go private, you're beholden to your shareholders to keep the price and earnings per share up, unless they explicitly agree to become a social welfare operation.
Your expenses pretty much consume your income, and yes, that includes profit. You're running a corporation, not a jobs program. You hire people to do what needs to be done to generate that profit.
You have little actual control over your investment income aside from selling and buying different stocks, so your income depends primarily on your sales, and you're only going to sell as much as people are going to buy.
When you're allocating your guzintas to cover your guzoutas, any time you give more to one, you have no choice but give less to others. If you can convince your shareholders that there will be a benefit later, you're welcome to try, but the fact that the bankruptcy attorneys weren't there to empty out your filing cabinets the first larger check you wrote is NOT sufficient to say that the added expense has been successfully absorbed. It'll be a couple of fiscal years at least before you can even comfortably take your finger off the light switch.
Increases in wages do not drive growth in an economy, and if everyone just does that it will be purely inflationary, especially under threat of force by the .gov. Economic growth drives increases in wages, as long as you're operating in a market rather than fascist crony capitalism.
Now, in my view, labor is very much a commodity, though it comes with a few loads. You need to be able to make an appropriate bid for the labor, just like any commodity, as was discussed upthread. If your wage structure is so inflexible all you can hire are the meth tweaks, you need to reevaluate. The thing is, the cost of labor is not equivalent between Butte Montana vs NYC. People in Butte don't need NYC wages to avoid dumpster dining. That one-size-fits-none is a great example of the inevitable failure of central planning.
The point it all comes down to, though, is if you're bleeding yourself to pay your labor more, it has to wind up coming from something else, and the most fertile ground among your guzintas is your sales, represented by price.
Until and unless you can buy back all the stock and go private, you're beholden to your shareholders to keep the price and earnings per share up, unless they explicitly agree to become a social welfare operation.
Your expenses pretty much consume your income, and yes, that includes profit. You're running a corporation, not a jobs program. You hire people to do what needs to be done to generate that profit.
You have little actual control over your investment income aside from selling and buying different stocks, so your income depends primarily on your sales, and you're only going to sell as much as people are going to buy.
When you're allocating your guzintas to cover your guzoutas, any time you give more to one, you have no choice but give less to others. If you can convince your shareholders that there will be a benefit later, you're welcome to try, but the fact that the bankruptcy attorneys weren't there to empty out your filing cabinets the first larger check you wrote is NOT sufficient to say that the added expense has been successfully absorbed. It'll be a couple of fiscal years at least before you can even comfortably take your finger off the light switch.
Increases in wages do not drive growth in an economy, and if everyone just does that it will be purely inflationary, especially under threat of force by the .gov. Economic growth drives increases in wages, as long as you're operating in a market rather than fascist crony capitalism.
Now, in my view, labor is very much a commodity, though it comes with a few loads. You need to be able to make an appropriate bid for the labor, just like any commodity, as was discussed upthread. If your wage structure is so inflexible all you can hire are the meth tweaks, you need to reevaluate. The thing is, the cost of labor is not equivalent between Butte Montana vs NYC. People in Butte don't need NYC wages to avoid dumpster dining. That one-size-fits-none is a great example of the inevitable failure of central planning.
The point it all comes down to, though, is if you're bleeding yourself to pay your labor more, it has to wind up coming from something else, and the most fertile ground among your guzintas is your sales, represented by price.
