Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, upper class means you profit from underpaying other people for their work.
Snarky, but I don't think you're wrong. People are generally paid based on how hard they are to replace, not by how much profit they generate. But in some markets, this results in people making terrible wages while the company makes tons of money, ie, Wal-mart and basically all the major fast food chains.
Corporations are so used to applying arbitrary values to ephemeral things on their balance sheets that I think such a mentality seeps over into highly skilled employees in some cases.
In other cases, the business's viability is determined by how many minimum wage (or better yet, off the books entirely) laborers can be obtained in a given week. See: every construction project in every US state, for example.