While you’re right about good workers making money, the systems of accounting that are in place make companies congenitally blind to this. Workers make things,

While you’re right about good workers making money, the systems of accounting that are in place make companies congenitally blind to this. Workers make things, then later those things are traded to customers for money. Of course we can intuit the underlying dynamic here (good workers->more things->more money) and draw the arrow from “good workers” to “more money”, but for companies the most legible dynamics are “you give money to workers, then [a bunch of stuff happens]” and “[a bunch of stuff happens], then customers give you money”. The only way they could legibly see workers making them money is if they saw a dynamic like “[a bunch of stuff happens], then workers give you money”, which is a bizarre scenario like workers paying them to work there. In the same way that a quirk of human eyeball anatomy means our eye cannot see a spot 15 degrees outwards and 1.5 degrees below meridian, a quirk of corporation accounting practices means their accounting cannot see a worker making money.