Returns To Labor

Henry Blodgett makes the case that it isn't a requirement of capitalism to pay your employees as little as possible:

One obvious solution to this problem is for big companies to pay their people more — to share more of the vast wealth that they create with the people who create it.
The companies have record profit margins, so they can certainly afford to do this.
But, unfortunately, over the past three decades, what began as a healthy and necessary effort to make our companies more efficient has evolved into a warped consensus that the only value that companies create is financial (cash) and that the only thing managers and owners should ever worry about is making more of it.
This view is an insult to anyone who has ever dreamed of having a job that is about more than money. And it is a short-sighted and destructive view of capitalism, an economic system that sustains not just this country but most countries in the world.
This view has become deeply entrenched, though.
These days, if you suggest that great companies should serve several constituencies (customers, employees, and shareholders) and that American companies should share more of their wealth with the people who generate it (employees), you get called a "socialist." You get called a "liberal." You get told that you "don't understand economics." You get accused of promoting "wealth confiscation." You get told that, in America, people get paid what they deserve to get paid: Anyone who wants more money should go out and "start their own company" or "demand a raise" or "get a better job."
In other words, you get told that anyone who suggests that great companies should share the value they create with all three constituencies instead of just lining the pockets of shareholders is an idiot.
After all, these folks say, one law of capitalism is that employers pay their employees as little as possible. Employees are just "costs." You should try to minimize those "costs" whenever and wherever you can.
This view, unfortunately, is not just selfish and demeaning. It's also economically stupid. Those "costs" you are minimizing (employees) are also current and prospective customers for your company and other companies. And the less money they have, the fewer products and services they are going to buy.

It would seem to me that this is common sense, but reading the comments sections of any blog post that suggests that current compensation schemes might not represent true value added brings down tons of comments about working harder and getting educated and earning what you get.  As a person who works in an office at a factory, I can say that the guys on the floor in the summer heat, working 10 or 11 hour days putting together industrial fans, are contributing pretty significantly to the product going out the door to customers.  They certainly work harder, physically, than any person in the office, under much worse conditions, but I'm pretty sure the folks in the air conditioning get paid more.  However, it isn't even the office workers who get the most rewards from the business for the least work when things are going well.  Unfortunately, our business hasn't been very profitable lately, but when it is, I can expect that much more of that profit will go to the owners who inherited the business from their parents or grandparents than will go to the guys sweating their asses off and actually earning that money for the business.  Luckily for me, I happen to be more closely related to the owners than to the workers, but the injustice of the setup isn't lost on me.  It just stuns me that so many people in the bottom part of the income pyramid buy into the tripe put out by the folks at the top to justify their position there.  Someday, probably sooner rather than later, that will change.