Blaming bankers and proposing revolution is one of those explanations that sounds satisfying but doesn’t really match the evidence. In some ways, as markets have become more efficient and transparent it becomes harder, not easier, for finance people to simply squeeze money out of the systems through financial tricks. We’re also living in a world where interest rates are at historical lows, making the cost of capital almost negligible for anyone with a good idea. The downside to taking this capital is that you’re giving away upside, but that’s not exactly a secret.
The bigger factor is that per-worker productivity is amplified immensely by technology. Historically, businesses needed to scale their employee base nearly linearly with the number of customers. If you were in the business of building houses or growing produce, your economies of scale topped out early. If you want to serve more customers, you have to hire more people to do the work.
In the technology era, the marginal cost of additional customers is minuscule. Netflix has to pay marginally more for bandwidth and licensing fees with each additional customer, but the number of employees necessary to support a growing customer base is minuscule. Even physical goods can have automated production as they scale up, so physical workers are less and less necessary as scale grows.
For the jobs that remain, supply and demand still dominates the equation. Engineer salaries have been pushed upward because demand for engineering work exceeds supply. Factory worker salaries have been flat or gone down because demand for [domestic] manual labor is decreasing, meaning more people are willing to work for lower compensation just to take those jobs.
Try as they might, the financial people can’t simply break the laws of supply and demand. If they try to keep so much of the profits that their wages fall below other companies, employees will simply leave for higher paying jobs. If the company raises wages so much that they need to charge customers more, their customers will simply leave for lower cost competitors.
This behavior is more intuitive when you put yourself in the shoes of the decision makers. If you called a plumbing company to fix your drain and they quote you a price 2X that of the competitor but claim that it’s because they pay their plumbers more, are you going to gladly take it? Or would you just call any number of alternatives that will charge you market rate costs? (If you are among the few who would gladly pay more for the same service, ask yourself how the general population would behave)