> Better employees, or employees that stay long enough to have experience both have a value that returns back to shareholders.

You're making the argument that companies should be nicer to their employees, because that is in the best interests of their shareholders. The linked article is implying that companies should be nicer to their employees, despite the best interests of their shareholders. These are 2 completely orthogonal arguments. The first is a moral argument, whereas the second is a business-tactics argument.

Since you brought it up, I certainly agree with the business-tactics argument to some extent. Companies like Google have certainly done well for their shareholders, by keeping their employees happy. But then again, companies like Walmart have shown that in some markets, employee happiness is barely correlated with shareholder returns.

Actually WalMart is very concerned about employee happiness. The things they do about it are very different from other industries, but they results are employees that are generally happy. Of course outsiders look at it and wonder how their employees can be happy.

From what I've read, Costco is extremely generous with how much they pay their (retail) employees, whereas Walmart doesn't even try to compete with Costco wrt (retail) employee happiness and satisfaction.

Whoa, you are trying to compare WalMart to Costco. They are different companies with different concerns.

WalMart is concerned about employee happiness and satisfaction. The actions they take are not the actions that other companies take. Their employees are happy enough with the results for WalMart to be satisfied with them. That others do different things (which may or may not achieve different results) is not important to WalMart. What is important is their return on investment, they have determined that more investment wouldn't be worth it.

Of course as outsiders we can look on WalMart and make value judgements. I wouldn't want to work there. I wouldn't want to work for Costcot either. YMMV.