Comment on Where *does* the money come from?
anon_8675309@lemmy.world 3 days agoThey have a fiduciary responsibility to the corporation and the shareholders. Increasing salaries to retain talent is part of this responsibility. However it is common for CEOs to mostly focus only on shareholders.
ALoafOfBread@lemmy.ml 3 days ago
It also depends on the state the company is incorporated in, but yeah that’s true.
And it is a duty to the corporation (legal entity), notably not to the workers themselves; so while the interests of workers and the corporation may align sometimes - you don’t have to do what’s best for the workers if it isn’t best for the company.
You still need to operate lawfully, and you can’t pay so little that you can’t hire/retain anyone, and you need to pay enough that you can hire people skilled enough to do the job, but you need to pay (ideally) only that amount and no more. Anything else takes away from profits and, you could say, makes the company less likely to succeed - if the company doesn’t succeed, then no one would have jobs. Or so they’d argue.
The same as for goods, the price of labor is treated by employers as “what the market will bear”. For goods, that means higher prices, for labor it means lower prices.