Selfish Reasons For Caring For Workers

Doing even that which is just and obligatory cannot make someone a just, righteous person if they are only doing it for personal gain, for social manipulation, or for emotionalistic satisfaction.  It is not enough to do something that is morally good by happenstance, with philosophical apathy, or for the sake of appearing like a moral giant to others when there is selfishness within.  Unless one's motives are to understand truth and live as one should in light of it, the only way one could perform a righteous act correctly is having the proper motivations.  Every individual has the power to keep their motives as secret as they can, but there is no such thing as being a good person only to impress or sway other people.  If moral obligations exist, submitting to them and fulfilling them is good in itself, and it is delusional to think other people's perceptions of oneself could possibly matter at all.

As impersonal as some of them can be, businesses are comprised of individuals.  Companies cannot exist without individuals.  Individuals inside a company, or at least a single one, are necessary for there to even be a business, as are people outside of the company who can purchase from it.  Whatever moral obligations there are would by necessity be binding for everyone in a business, from the lowest "unskilled" worker to the highest executives.  Just as some individual people, for reasons that have nothing to do with occupation or corporate profit, make a habit of anything from fighting illicit discrimination to helping the poor and beyond to gain public recognition, the leaders of certain companies might strive to do things which are ultimately morally good, but with a desire for nothing more than to be perceived as good.  After all, a public that has favorable perceptions of a company is less likely to oppose it or stir up controversy.

Livable compensation, paid or unpaid time off, healthcare benefits, a welcoming atmosphere, and more are not beyond any thriving corporation's reach if only they were managed in such a way as to prioritize worker wellbeing; there is no excuse for why the leaders of major companies do not even consistently offer their workers survivable wages/salaries and the full acknowledgment that professional work is but a relatively trivial part of life compared to so much else.  Even when there are steps in a more humanitarian direction, including anything from Amazon's company-wide minimum wage of $15 an hour (just over double the minimum wage in some states) to general promises to be more environmentally friendly, a company that is only trying to use fair pay, work-life balance, diversity, environmentalism, or any other Biblically good thing for mere public relations purposes is not truly an ethical workplace.

What about companies that might pay people well only so they might spend more on the products or services produced by their own workplaces?  Some businesses would very likely remove almost all appealing or obligatory aspects of how they treat their workers (or consumers) if only there would be no outcry from those inside or outside the companies, and when a company only treats its workers like holistic humans when they are pressured to by a hostile public or by legislation, it is almost certainly the case that its owner(s) would have continued whatever exploitation they were practicing if they could do it unopposed.  Caring for workers on a financial or emotional level is woefully incomplete if the goal is only to appease people to generate more revenue or remove obstacles to corporate success.  Like other non-rationalists, executives and managers who are concerned only with personal gain might unintentionally or egoistically do that which is just without a devotion to reason or morality.  How they can profit is prioritized over truths like the secondary nature of work to other things or the fact that worker exploitation is not justified by utilitarian or emotionalistic benefit.