Why don't companies invest in better managers? It seems like it could help make their stores operate more efficiently and at the same time it would reduce the chances that the employees form a union, which is costly to the business.
If paying your lowest tier workers a living wage and good benefits would disrupt the business, could it be that your business relies on suffering to exist?
If living wage is substantially different from the market rate, employer cannot afford it without going out of business. Employers don't have infinite money, they have checks and balances. Paying employees more would require different pricing model, for example. If your pricing is far enough from what customer is ready to pay, customer is not paying and you end up out of business.
Basically, employer's responsibility is to pay market rate, not living wage. If there's a disconnect, it needs to be addressed on the legislation level, not individual employer level.
a low market rate means that there are a lot of poor schmucks willing to work for scraps.
if a business can not survive without paying a living wage then it should not exist in the first place. no amount of legislation can fix that
Which, honestly, maybe it shouldn't.
It's all responsibility and no authority. You probably don't even have much discretion or visibility when it comes to how employees are rewarded.
Bonus, it pays considerbly less than anything else you can do.
Which is honestly better than bringing in corporate managers who have no experience anyway.
Is it possible to calculate the possible return on investment in training? Maybe? It is most certainly possible to calculate the cost of training, and that sum comes right out of profits, so it doesn't happen, given the other is unknown. This is the way of things in corporate America. Profit above all.
Apologies for my cynicism, but I'm finding it harder and harder to exist in the status quo.
Because the more you invest down at the levels where it really matters, the less you have left to line the pockets of the ultra-rich alphabet soup at the upper levels. Gotta pay for those multi-million dollar "bonus/severance packages" and all that junk somehow right?
Software is lucky that we can go Architecure route for promotion instead of a Engineering Manager route. This is not the case for most other professions.
$$$$
But they should.