It's not an iron law. Plenty of employers spend more money, in order to increase retention and productivity. Believe it or not, there are many employers who actually care and see their employees as human.
You're under the misconception that businesses should be run as charities and those businesses that are not are harming the world. This is simply not true.
Paying the market wage, meaning the best (lowest) price you can find that meets all of your requirements for quality of service, is still contributing to the global economy.
And by making your firm more productive, you are increasing the pool of goods/services that the world's consumers can divide amongst themselves. That's how for profit enterprises contribute to a rising standard of living.
They are not mutex. You can actually care about your employees, see them as human, and pay them an amount that you both mutually consent to, which is what Amazon is doing.
> You can actually care about your employees, see them as human
Amazon doesn't. That's the point.
You are wildly oversimplifying the iron law of wages. It does not say "it is morally acceptable for employers to treat employees as badly as they can possibly get away with."
No one is entitled to a job. They are willing to do the work asked of them in exchange for the pay they receive. They are not victims and Amazon is not mistreating them.
More generally, this idea that paying more is better for the world is misguided and over-simplistic. You can often reduce suffering in the world more by paying 100 very poor people sweat shop wages than 10 middle class people developed world wages, and that is the kind of choice you have to make when deciding how to spend your capital.
We cannot simply increase the wealth at our disposal and pay all 100 people high wages. Scarcity of resources is a reality we have to be mature enough to contend with, and that means looking at more than just the direct and immediate effects, and factoring in opportunity costs, to weigh the trade-offs.
If you want to argue that, due to scarcity, we can't maximize global quality of life without mistreating some people, that is least a coherent argument.
There is no coherent argument that Amazon isn't treating its employees poorly, even relative to other companies in the same fields. Read some articles about working conditions at Amazon. This one's a decent starting point: https://gizmodo.com/reminder-amazon-treats-its-employees-lik...
I know about the difficult working conditions, but calling it mistreatment implies Amazon doesn't have a right to offer these terms in the free market, and that the employees would be better off if they didn't have the jobs.
The working conditions are voluntarily assumed by the employees, so it can't be mistreatment, and the terms offered are the best the employees could find on the market, so they are better off for these jobs existing. I don't see the rationale behind calling it mistreatment and implying Amazon is having w negative impact.
Paying the market wage, meaning the best (lowest) price you can find that meets all of your requirements for quality of service, is still contributing to the global economy.
And by making your firm more productive, you are increasing the pool of goods/services that the world's consumers can divide amongst themselves. That's how for profit enterprises contribute to a rising standard of living.