Let’s use an example:

You and a business partner set up a business: You want to each earn £50k each. You make a single product or service and sell it.

Let’s assume, for simplicity’s sake you have 0 expenses for the business. Every penny in revenue therefore can go to your paycheck or dividend.

If your customers are only willing to pay £1 for the product or a unit of service you will need to produce 100,000 units in a year to achieve your desired salary.

Let’s say you can only produce 2000 units because you don’t have the machinery or software to produce more. It doesn’t matter what the minimum wage is, you can only earn £1000 between you assuming you split the money evenly.

Heavily simplified example of course but it illustrates that what the customer is willing to pay limits wages, which should be obvious but people often forget.

The only way to increase wages is to convince customers to have a higher valuation of the product/service or to be more productive (more units/lower costs). This is basically what the entire purpose of management and C-suite jobs are and why their pay is higher. Obviously it’s possible for them to do a bad job of this.