[int_19h]

I don't see why having to pay significantly more to people cleaning the toilets is a downside. It's a shit job, the pay should reflect that. Of course when people are forced into the treadmill just to get fed, they will take it for pennies, but that doesn't mean that it's the right way to do things.

[somenameforme]

Ideally I absolutely agree with you - I think everybody would. The problem is reality. Companies that make/sell real things, and not software, have almost shockingly low profit margins, with labor costs generally being their greatest expense by far. WalMart's net profit margin, for instance, is less than 3%. And as they have an absolutely massive number of employees (they're the third largest employer in the world in fact), their profit per employee is quite low - somewhere around $7,000.

Software and tech companies don't treat their employees better because they care more about their employees, but because they're drowning in money owing to ridiculous profit margins. Apple's net profit margin is > 24% with a greater than $2 million profit per employee!! [1] They could buy every single employee a new Ferrari every single year and still have [literally] more money than they know what to do with.

So you have this imbalance in the economy that employees working jobs that pay stupidly high wages are the ones where the companies could generally afford to pay them even more, dramatically more, but instead just hoard all the money. Whereas low wage jobs are the ones where companies themselves are also just 'barely getting by', but at a large enough scale - that can translate to billions of dollars, even if it's not much per employee.

[1] - https://appleworld.today/2024/10/apple-generates-2-3-million...