The fact that the whole country collectively agrees gives the workers far more power.
Treated badly? Go work for a competitor. That’s how you put pressure on companies to treat staff better.
A society cannot rely on a business whose sole motivation is profitability to provide power to what they view as a liability, not an asset.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average...
Keep in mind that there was a massive rise in C-level and especially CEO compensation compared to most other wages. Arguably this can be traced back to a specific book being rather popular among wealthy investors and entrepreneurs that argued CEOs are underpaid, which many CEOs agreed with and convinced the investors to also agree with. But this does nothing for the wages of anyone outside this group because C-level compensation is orders of magnitude removed from that of anyone lower in the ladder.
The US has the 3rd highest median wages, and Sweden has the 14th highest median wage.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-in...
It's up to the company to fulfil its mutually-agreed terms of contract to those employees. Which in most cases means giving them the dignity and security of a monthly paycheque.
In a free market economy (that isn't overly constrained by government and unions), employees can gain all the "power" they like by starting a company of their own, and setting whatever rules they like.
If you're seeking "power" without taking responsbility (i.e. running your own compnany), sounds like you want to indulge in politics, as opposed to a good-faith employee-employer relationship.
- Libertarians overlook all the problems with markets that Adam Smith identified. It's as though they never read the second half of the book.
- Libertarians overlook how existing players raise barriers to entry for existing markets.
- Libertarians overlook the collusion between market players and government to share power and wealth between both.
- Libertarians make many, many, many assumptions that are demonstrably false.
At this point all we can assume is libertarians know all this, yet keep advocating for libertarianism because it is they who seek the power and the wealth. That is to say, the libertarians are the bad guys, or, they're the stupid guys.
Everything has a simple solution until humans get complicated.
There's no market incentive for companies to "treat staff better" (which is really an oversimplification when it comes to basic things like following workplace safety laws, providing paid medical leave and health insurance, not cheap window dressing like foosball machines and free energy drinks) beyond the minimum you can get away with. Payroll is one of the biggest cost factors in most businesses if not the biggest. That means companies are always incentivized to cut labor costs where possible. This is why you say mass layoffs followed by share price increases.
If you really want "the market" to fix this problem, ban individual ownership of corporations and require all businesses to act as worker cooperatives. This gives every worker equal power in whichever business they decide to join and gives the owners an incentive to treat workers better because the workers are the owners. You could also do this incrementally by offering public grants to creating cooperatives or turning existing corporations into cooperatives (e.g. by creating a subsidized program to allow workers to "buy out" a bankrupt employer).
We don't want a top-down autocratic state so why should we accept a top-down autocratic corporation ruled by a single owner or a non-working board that is only interested in the resale value of the company, not its long-term profitability or sustainability?