I'm a California restaurant operator preparing for the $20-an-hour fast-food wage by trimming hours, eliminating employee vacation, and raising menu prices
The problem you’re describing is capitalism, not profit or commerce.
In my real-world example, who pays for travel? If profit is just stolen labor value, clearly everyone gets all the money for hours worked, right? So who pays for travel? And wait, it actually takes longer for the juniorest dev to write some code because they’re still learning. Do they get a larger slice of the pie? They have the least experience and contributed the least overall. If we go by hourly wages then suddenly Goodhart’s Law kicks in.
This isn’t some hypothetical. This is a real problem real devs go through regularly and something I’ve been a part of off and on for a long time. You can call me a bootlicker all you want; I don’t really think that’s a good faith conversation so you’re not worth my time.
You can’t even define the labor value and who gets paid what in what you called a very simplistic example. Unless you can do that, you can take your theory back to the message boards and leave those of us that actually try to figure out how to make sure equity happens alone.
Generally, expenses are taken out pre-wage. That’s how expenses work. Generally, the team agrees on what equitable distribution is and reinvestment of profit. That’s how contracts and commerce works. Generally, profit can be reinvested to create more jobs and more opportunities. That’s why smart labor sometimes decides equitable pay leaves room for profit. I don’t know who you’re reading that doesn’t cover the basics, but you should probably expand.