Why might it sometimes appear as if a company will part with money as long as it goes to anything but to pay increases for workers, or particularly to those at the lower levels of the organization? Extreme (and unmerited) executive compensation and bonuses or donations for the sake of superficial public relations are just two things money can be far more likely to be directed towards than employee raises across the board, even if there is absolutely plenty to spare and the workers are not currently paid livable or fair wages. Not even making and overtly celebrating record profits stops certain companies from acting like there is just not enough to pay employees more, although the leadership is content to inflate prices because times are allegedly "tough" for corporate executives and their profits.
Spending large amounts on meals with clients, useless or relatively trivial "perks" that do not involve monetary benefit for the employees, and on paying legal fines (and even a fine of $12,000,000 would not be severe for a major corporation like Google that makes hundreds of billions a year) seems to be prioritized by various companies in the cases of the former two and accepted in the case of the latter. It really is more probable that a typical company might be willing to spend more money as long as it does not go to the workers, without whom there would not be a business at all or at least a business functioning beyond a far more limited scope [1].
Desperate workers, workers who need their job to survive, are certainly ideal for an organization bent on maximal exploitation. The employee who needs to keep their job because they are too exhausted to look for work elsewhere or too financially unstable to dare to defy their employer has little they can do to resist genuine workplace oppression; as long as their predicament is not their own fault due to reckless or emotionalistic overspending, it really is solely the fault of materialistic or power-drunk employers and management that they are made to economically struggle when there is more than enough money to pay employees livable amounts (or better!) while still seeing vast profit go to members of the upper hierarchy.
Such is the nature of an inherently exploitative workplace system like that of American capitalism (and any other such variation). All the more illogical is that some who perpetuate the present state of the typical American workplace--yes, not even widespread oppression necessitates that every company practices this--identify as Christians and yet would ignore or even be hostile towards the command of Yahweh to pay workers before sunset the same day as their labor (Leviticus 19:13, Deuteronomy 24:14-15). Yes, Biblical workers' rights go beyond what many secular people, whose moral philosophy (if they really believe it) could only be rooted in subjective conscience or arbitrary cultural norms or some other invalid/assumed things, would adhere to.
Again, revenue could go to showing gratuitous "appreciation" for clients or paying for enormous lawsuits that perhaps nonetheless barely make a dent in the sheer profit generated by the company. The actual workers are the ones trampled in spite of being a foundational part of the operations. This phenomenon likely often reduces down to employers either viewing employees as horrid leeches that parasitically require compensation (in contrast with consumers, who are at least superficially catered to respectfully in order to extract money from them) or to hoping to keep them in a state of financial desperation to distract them from thoughts of "insubordination" or resigning.
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