> Your workers are a tiny portion of your customer base. Let some other sap pay theirs well.

Other companies notice your "brilliant" strategy and start adopting it, and now your sales are in terminal decline as your customer base is impoverished. Short-term thinking is the Achilles heel of modern capitalism. Unless of course the new economy is automated companies trading with other automated companies; maximizing shareholder value as the human race withers away. This reminds me a short story of a damaged ambulatory AI space-suit carrying an injured and dying/dead astronaut over the surface of a desolate planet to get to "civilization" thousands of miles away.