They are in the business of making money, not happy employees.
As long as legislation can be bought through lobbyists and the general public is uninterested on participating in the process, the middle class may continue to shrink as more of the national wealth ends up in the hands of a small number of the super wealthy.
BUSINESS=MONEY
They pay what they need to pay employees to get the job done.
From their point of view, why should they pay more.
Competition from imports with cheap labor is tough, and in China or India where people are a bulk commodity, they can pay much less.
The upper level managers are running the company, and only key employees are hard to replace.
If a person wants to earn a decent living, he/she has to plan for it with skills and hard work learning.
Businesses are not a charity.
Add: Employees struggle because usually they wasted the first 21 years of their life. There are a large number also in families of single mothers on welfare who decided having a child would be fun and then the child struggles and does the same. Rotten cycle.
While I'm not a fan of huge bonus payments for directors and CEOs and such like, there is often a reason for these bonuses, even when a company is apparently losing money.
As for workers getting paid very little, do you know how much (in capital and earnings) it takes to keep the job open? I've just been looking into a company (one that didn't pay its managers bonuses this year), and it looks like it takes revenue of $100,000 per employee per annum to be able to pay the minimum hourly wage for a 40-hour week.
Most workers work about 2000 hours a year (the basic time they are there, including sick leave). And they get paid for about 2100 hours if you include holiday pay
They pay employees base on several factors, skills required, experience, supply and demand. So if a job requires very few if any skills and there are lots of people available to fill that job, it's pay is close to minimum wage... think fast food worker. If the job requires huge amounts of skill or tons of experience and there are very few people that can do that job, then the pay is very very high... think DOCTOR or CEO. The reason managers get bonuses and the like is because very few people have those skills and they are often under a ton of pressure to perform and if they don't they get fired.
If the workers dont like it they can leave. If all the workers left the company would have to raise salaries. Its called the free market system, which doesnt really exist with a minimum wage law.
Not all companies do - and remember, "upper managers" are employees, too.
