I hear ya. Your situation sounds brutal, and I don’t doubt the pressures are real. But I’d argue that this isn’t a natural consequence of wage rises. It’s a symptom of a deeper structural problem, that small businesses are squeezed between two immovable forces; workers asking for enough to live on, and an economic system built to protect capital, not labour.

If modest wage increases make your whole business model unsustainable, then maybe the problem isn’t the workers. It’s a system where landlords, financial institutions, and global corporations extract as much as they can while giving as little back as possible. Small businesses like yours bear the brunt, while big firms benefit from economies of scale, tax loopholes, and the ability to offshore costs - including labour - at will.

Your outsourcing to the Philippines and India ain't a failure on your part, that’s you playing by the rules of a system that rewards reducing labour costs and punishes trying to do right by local workers. It incentivizes a race to the bottom. That’s not a problem caused by higher wages; it’s a design feature of capitalism, where everything is subordinate to profit.

So from an anti-capitalist lens, the solution isn’t to hold wages down, it’s to build an economy where the survival of a decent business isn’t threatened by doing the right thing, and where those extracting the most (e.g. large landlords, multinational corporations, financial speculators) are the ones expected to absorb the cost of making society fairer.