Paying workers anything at all is in direct conflict with generating shareholder value.
Key is "long term". If you want to maximize long term salaries, you must pay a decent return to equity.
On the other hand, there's absolutely no need to pay anything to shareholders for a company to operate, other than legal obligation. Shareholders going on strike makes absolutely no difference for the company.
you need to get funding in order for company to continue operating. If you don't pay a decent return for the funding, you just won't get funded.
> Shareholders going on strike makes absolutely no difference for the company.
This applies only to companies that do not require capital to operate/grow.
Of course, if you get yourself a reputation of not returning money to investors, you'll unlikely to get funded the next time, and if the investors have no way to force the company to pay dividends, they will fund few companies in the first place. The point is, maximizing salaries paid is a terrible metric, precisely because of bad incentives it creates.
> This applies only to companies that do not require capital to operate/grow.
But when they require capital to grow, you aren't returning the money to investors anyway -- what would be the point of that? The investors only expect the dividends once the capital needs of the company are satisfied, and once that happens, the company no longer needs the investors.
No, you would still need to grow to a large company with lots of revenue, but if the metric to optimize is salaries paid, then paying shareholders anything at all is in direct conflict with paying salaries to workers. The problem here is designing set of incentives that would encourage appropriate results, and the difficulty is that not all incentives work equally well, or even at all.