For publicly traded companies, not maximizing shareholder returns can be a criminal offense. This is the real problem.
There is no explicit duty to maximize shareholder returns. In most jurisdictions there is a duty for directors and officers to act in the best interest of the company and its shareholders (as a whole; most places a director does not represent a specific shareholder even if selected by a specific shareholder).
This can be interpreted as maximising returns, assuming that is what shareholders ask for, and there's no charter etc. that set out other goals for the company. But it can also mean prioritising any number of other goals as long as investors are not misled about it.
In general the board and officers have quite wide latitude as long as there's at least a plausible subjective argument to be made that their actions are in the interest of the company and shareholders on the basis that shareholders can have them replaced if they're not doing the jobs shareholders want.
Anything else would be pretty much an impossible situation, as there's no objective best course of action to maximize returns.
I can see that not maximizing returns can cause a storm in the shareholder meetings, but can you give a source for it being a "criminal offense" to refrain from doing so?
They've been able to resist because they have demonstrated that shareholder returns are better when employees are well-paid and -treated.
Here's some comment on this with quotations from actual law, but note that (1) it's from the UK rather than the US and presumably the relevant laws aren't quite the same, and (2) the author's position is further to the left than is customary in the US. So discount it as you please. http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2011/10/24/companies-do-n...
And a more US-centric discussion with some useful links: http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/8146/are-u-s-com...
And a white paper whose main topic is executive compensation but that has a useful discussion of this issue (in section 2): http://www.neiinvestments.com/neifiles/PDFs/5.4%20Research/E... -- reading between the lines, it looks as if there's at least a case to be made that US case law requires corporations to act in the financial interests of their shareholders, but it's debatable, and in other jurisdictions there isn't even much of a case to be made.
(I am not, even slightly, a lawyer.)
In Dodge v. Ford Motor Co., the only reason the court found in favor of the shareholders was that Ford explicitly testified that he thought his company was making too much money and he felt obliged to use the money to benefit the public. Even this ruling, which is the one that established the "maximizing shareholder returns" precedent, stopped short of preventing Ford from taking the public-benefiting actions that the shareholders wanted to prevent, it merely required the company to continue paying dividends to the shareholders.
I've not once heard of this actually being pursued. This line seems to me to be something of an urban myth.