So much of it comes down to the question of what money is and where it originates.

"I can't afford to pay my staff a living wage" more often boils down to "I can't get the credit necessary to run my business in the red until I hit a critical mass of consumers" than "my workers simply aren't productive enough". All too often, the Small Business Owner is just middle management for the primary lender. And the only way they can feel successful is by cannibalizing their own accumulated assets in order to purchase the luxury status symbols they assumed they would have been entitled to by now.

In a saner world, business "owners" (more like "borrowers") would have a class interest with their labor force. But the employment relationship - one in which a single individual assumes enormous debt in order to take a swing at joining the petite bourgeoisie class, while staff run around trying to justify the massive interest payments through their surplus labor - is designed to cultivate the toxic employment relationships through pressure tactics and business channel misinformation.