[andrewaylett]

On the other side: without the workers, those large capital investments are useless lumps of metal.

Both Capital and Labour invest in the company, in different ways. It's not at all clear to me that the optimal arrangement is that Capital reaps the bulk of the return from those investments.

[xyzzyz]

This is literally opposite of the truth. In almost all businesses, the wages constitutes higher share of revenues than profits.

[andrewaylett]

The value of a business isn't its wages or its immediate profits: it (over-simplified) represents a claim on the future profits.

Equity grants (and especially options) aren't particularly controversial in tech, and I'm not saying they're the answer to the problem at hand. But they're a mechanism for allowing workers to share in the gain from their investment. All the problems (especially with US tax treatment of options) notwithstanding.