This is an updated version of “If Your Business Can’t Afford Living Wages, It’s Already Failing” that you will find below. A conversation with a reader had me revisit the wording of the original piece.

What happens when a business survives only because its workers cannot? This is not a question we often ask in economic discussions, yet it cuts to the heart of how we choose to behave in a market economy.

Consider this statement I encountered recently:

Employers hate paying workers more because higher wages mean lower profit rates. Some marginally profitable businesses will face bankruptcy. Wealth holders will be concerned about companies raising prices to meet their profit objectives and causing inflation.

At first glance, this reads as neutral economic analysis. But what assumptions rest beneath these words? What might we discover if we examined the unspoken premises of this economic logic?

When we speak of “marginally profitable businesses,” we’re using language that conceals as much as it reveals. What does “marginal profitability” mean in human terms? For the business owner, it represents thin financial margins on the profit and loss statement. For workers, it often translates to lives lived on even thinner margins—choosing between medicine and food, working multiple jobs, relying on public assistance to bridge the gaps their wages cannot cover.

This raises uncomfortable questions about how we define business viability. We typically measure a company’s health by its ability to generate profit after covering its costs. But what if certain costs aren’t appearing on that profit and loss statement at all? What if they’ve been transferred elsewhere—to workers’ bodies, to families, to communities, to taxpayers?

When a business pays less than living wages, someone still pays the difference. The worker who postpones medical care until it becomes an emergency. The family that relies on food banks to supplement inadequate grocery budgets. The community that provides housing assistance. The taxpayers who fund public benefits for employed people whose paychecks don’t cover basic needs.

This isn’t to vilify business owners or entrepreneurs, many of whom operate under their own significant constraints and pressures. Rather, it’s an invitation to examine the choices we make in shaping our economy and whether they uphold the dignity of those within it. That a business is profitable is only one dimension of what it needs to be. Businesses don’t operate in a vacuum—they exist within a broader context. Having received from this context, should they not also contribute to it?

It invites us to examine how our economic arrangements shape the kind of society we become together. What behaviors and values do our business practices encourage? What kind of relationships do they foster between people? What does it mean when we accept—even expect—that certain categories of work will not support the workers who perform it?

Some might argue that workers unsatisfied with their wages can simply go elsewhere. But this response treats labor as a purely functional market input rather than something tied to human lives. It answers the mechanical question of how markets adjust, but not the ethical one: Is it ever justifiable to treat people as disposable means to an end?

And what about risk and transparency? Investors who provide capital to businesses do so with explicit awareness of the risks involved—indeed, they expect higher returns precisely because they acknowledge these risks. But do workers at low-wage employers enter with similar transparency about the company’s financial position? Or do they stake their livelihoods on these enterprises without the information investors would consider essential? This asymmetry is not just financial; it raises a deeper question about what fairness looks like in an economic community.

Perhaps most importantly, what alternatives might we imagine? If we questioned the necessity of business models built on below-living wages, what different arrangements might emerge? What innovations in business structure, technology, pricing, or consumer expectations might develop in response?

History offers some clues. Previous labor standards that seemed economically impossible at their introduction—the end of child labor, the 40-hour workweek, workplace safety regulations—did not destroy economic vitality as predicted. Instead, they spurred adaptation and often led to unexpected productivity improvements.

What if the choice isn’t between low-wage jobs or no jobs at all, but rather between our current arrangement and something we haven’t yet fully imagined—something that better aligns with both enterprise and human dignity?

Discussions about wages and business viability are not just technical matters. They are ethical ones, shaping the conditions under which people can build their lives. If we approach them with curiosity rather than resignation, what possibilities might we be overlooking?

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If Your Business Can’t Afford Living Wages, It’s Already Failing

We call it entrepreneurship, but too often, it’s just corporate welfare. When businesses refuse to pay living wages, someone else covers the difference—taxpayers, families, communities. Workers stretch every dollar, rely on public assistance, or take on multiple jobs just to survive, all so “entrepreneurs” can keep labor costs low and profits intact. And yet, the only time we hear alarm bells about economic collapse is when workers demand more—never when businesses build their survival on poverty wages.

I came across this over the weekend: “Employers hate paying workers more because higher wages mean lower profit rates. Some marginally profitable businesses will face bankruptcy. Wealth holders will be concerned about companies raising prices to meet their profit objectives and causing inflation.”

This statement frames higher wages as simply eating into profits, but let’s call it what it is: a defense of business models built on paying people less than they need to live. If your company can only stay afloat by keeping workers in poverty, you don’t have a viable business—you have a failing operation propped up by other people’s hardship.

The hand-wringing about “marginally profitable businesses facing bankruptcy” conveniently ignores that these companies are already functionally bankrupt. They’re just offloading their failure onto workers’ backs instead of admitting it. Real viability means covering your actual costs—including paying people enough to live on.

What burns me up is how workers at these struggling companies shoulder all the risk without knowing it. They’re staking their entire livelihoods on businesses hanging by a thread, with zero transparency and none of the upside that investors get for taking similar risks. Their reward for this gamble? Barely making rent.

And that fear about inflation from wage increases? Funny how that concern disappears when discussing executive compensation or record corporate profits. The alarm only sounds when regular people might get a slightly larger slice of the pie.

But the problem doesn’t stop with individual workers. There’s a broader social cost to businesses that refuse to pay fair wages.

When wages are too low, workers don’t just struggle in isolation—the rest of society picks up the tab. Taxpayers subsidize companies that refuse to pay living wages through food assistance, housing programs, and healthcare. Entire communities suffer as local economies shrink, and people are trapped in cycles of financial insecurity with no way out. Chronic stress from low wages leads to health problems, burnout, and instability, all of which ripple outward.

And let’s be clear: the market doesn’t punish businesses that exploit workers—it rewards them. It’s not just that bad businesses manage to survive; it’s that they thrive in a system that incentivizes cutting labor costs at any expense. Meanwhile, businesses that pay fairly are put at a competitive disadvantage. This isn’t just a failure of individual companies—it’s a structural problem baked into how we define “success.”

So, let’s ask the real question: What kind of economy are we choosing to build? One that treats labor as a disposable cost? Or one that recognizes that a business that can’t afford to pay living wages isn’t a business at all—it’s just a machine extracting value from workers while someone else covers the consequences?

The cold truth? If paying living wages would kill your business, your business model is already dead—you’re just using workers as life support. And the rest of society is footing the bill.

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