On a pragmatic level wholly separate from any moral errors therein, it is by logical necessity contrary to a greedy corporation's own ends to trample on workers and consumers. Two very publicly controversial issues of recent years illustrate this. If either artificial intelligence/general machinery phases out human workers for good en masse or if employers refuse to increase wages and salaries to account for the rising cost of living, eventually, people simply cannot afford to keep paying companies for their goods and services. Many of these products are not necessary for survival or basic physical health as it is, which could easily impact the choices consumers would very likely make if forced into a sufficiently desperate scenario. Greed hyper-prioritized on an enormous scale carries the seeds of its own downfall.
Suppose Company A gives minimal raises or little to none at all, its leadership hoping to keep more consumer expenditure for themselves. The employees are already not paid enough for their families to get by on a single full-time income. This is aside from Company A intentionally keeping some of its workers below the threshhold of hours necessary to incur the added expense of worker benefits like insurance. Because of this, the employees are unable to truly save for a financially stable future; immediate needs like food, electricity, and rent or a mortgage persist, and this does not account for expensive healthcare emergencies. If Companies B, C, D, and so on do the exact same things, people who are not already wealthy enough to leverage the likes of investments in their favor will struggle severely to ever gain their economic footing.
Prices will almost certainly keep rising due to inflation and plain corporate greed. After all, those coveted annual and quarterly numbers are not going to just increase themselves. Entire industries based on nonessential purchases would erode—yes, mere survival for the sake of survival is stupid and meaningless, but you cannot as much as subjectively enjoy anything if you are not alive to do so. Because workers are not paid enough to be at liberty to keep the economy functioning without sacrificing their literal needs, the companies who maximized profit to such an extent would have shot themselves in their feet. Companies could then shift their attention solely to rich clients, but this still significantly restricts their potential earnings, and it is not as if even the ultra wealthy have infinite resources or would automatically be willing to conduct business with them (especially if their products and services are not "high-end").
After a point, and that point could vary depending on the economic factors of a person's location, time in history, and so on, the only reason a person would ever continue trying to amass wealth is egoism, the pursuit of as much power as they can obtain, or a passive kind of stupidity that prioritizes irrationalistic expansion. All the same, the type of person who might try in vain to seize eternally inflating profits or deprive workers of livable compensation could on one hand use every method they can get away with to reach for these respectively impossible and asinine goals. They might also, on the other hand, be the exact type of person whose heart would panic at the prospect of their own methods conflicting with increasing profits: why would the masses spend money on their products when they cannot afford things vital for living or can afford nothing beyond this?
The same employers or shareholders who devoted themselves so pathetically to a social construct over logical necessity and concerns about moral obligation would have exhausted their best pragmatic chances at securing long-term flourishing. There is no contradiction between human workers receiving livable compensation or better (rather than being forsaken whenever possible for machines and AI software), consumers having excess discretionary income, and corporations making genuine profits. Attempts to support the latter of these three things by disregarding the former two will, if extensive enough, devastate the ability to generate increasing profits. There cannot be infinite financial growth with limited consumer markets, a limited world population, and a limited number of logically possible goods and services anyway. One of the corporation's best hopes for securing and keeping profitability is ultimately not depriving workers of wages or replacing almost all of them with artificial intelligence.
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