I think you are mistaken to think there is no business case for good, stable salaries. Think motivation, employee retention, attractiveness to prospective employees, team spirit, ... you can easily argue that a good and happy team is worth more in the long term to shareholders than the cliché American hedge fund strategy of buying a company, reducing staff and staff salaries and cashing out. What's good for the employees need not be bad for business, certainly not in this case as it also happened to generate goodwill and attention/good press for the company, but there are also plenty of good reasons in other cases.