The Two Possible Reasons For Low Wages

As multifaceted as business can be, there are ultimately only two core reasons why a company, if applicable, pays its workers too little to survive or flourish on.  There might be plenty of fallacious excuses, of course.  Underpayment might be regarded as an inherent part of most business structures, despite how every business can be restructured, for better or worse, if only those with the most power decide to make it happen.  There are multiple logically possible corporate structures, not that this makes all of them pragmatically, morally, or otherwise philosophically valid.  Businesses only operate in a certain way because they are made or allowed to.

In light of this, there is no inevitable reason why wages and salaries are too low to truly, comfortably live on.  One possibility is that the business has the revenue to support each full-time employee with livable compensation, and leadership still decides otherwise because it would diminish the amount of profit available.  In other words, those at the top of the corporate hierarchy could absolutely pay each of them enough that they do not struggle with housing, food, transportation, basic healthcare, and so on.  The owner could be sluggish about considering updates for compensation to at least match the rising cost of living without any actual malice, but it still reduces down to some sort of fallacy or egoism either way.

The only other possibility is that the business literally cannot survive in its current configuration without explicitly relying on underpayment of workers in order to pay its expenses and make a profit.  If this is truly the case, and it could be particularly with certain small businesses due to being founded on exploitation and resource mismanagement, then the business does not have the financial capacity to continue and be worthy of having employees.  The owner(s) might even privately acknowledge that the pay is subpar, along with any benefits that might or might not be offered; it is just that this is intentional for the sake of keeping the company afloat rather than amassing even more profit.

In one the first category, the company leadership is delusional by virtue of living in an egoistic way, with no regard for reason and morality over their subjective whims and pragmatic success.  In the second, the company is purposefully or negligently engineered from the start to be incredibly inefficient with its resources, including its human resources, who are incentivized to leave whether the owner believes so or not.  Even aside from any legitimate moral errors, and the philosophical idiocy of subjectivist or egoistic beliefs one way or another, low wages or salaries objectively hinder the success of businesses by depriving employees of the one thing professional work is inherently supposed to provide: monetary stability.

There is no valid reason for paying full-time workers anything less than what is required to survive and save money past covering basic living costs like rent, electricity, and so on.  Doing otherwise deprives employees of the only core need that work fulfills--financial stability--and treats them in a way that is by default exploitative.  Even if there is no such thing as morality or if objective morality is really such that this sort of operation is not unjust, it is nonetheless pragmatically asinine.  Businesses, from small businesses to megacorporations, need workers if they are to expand beyond the scope of one single person's output; obstructing the literal reason for professional labor as a whole makes outcomes like turnover far more probable.