> Where, exactly, does the money to pay for their additional salary and jobs come from?
Why does anyone pay anyone else to do work for them? If this situation was actually zero-sum, then employees would get paid for a while until companies ran out of money, and then no one would ever get paid again. Fortunately, this is not a zero-sum situation, and people pay other people to do work in order to produce more value for the people paying for the work than they pay for the work.
For example, if I pay you $50 to put together $50 worth of components into a phone, I then go and sell that phone for more than $100. You get $50, whoever sold me the components gets $50, I get my sell price - $100 for the phone, and whoever buys it gets a shiny new phone. Everybody wins.
And it goes further! Everyone who made money takes their money and spends it on things other people have produced via their hard work -- or they invest it with some people for those people to try to make something more of that investment. Or they sit on it and spend it later, because they don't know what they want to spend it on right now. Whatever they do, the entire economy gets some action... eventually.
But let's say I'm kind of racist and sexist and biased in all kinds of ways and not necessarily aware of all the ways in which I'm biased, aka an actual human being. Then I might decide not to even consider hiring some people, because I think they wouldn't be able to do the work, when in reality they might do just fine, but my biases are getting the better of me. Then I might not hire as many people, and so I wouldn't pay as many workers to make phones, and I wouldn't pay for as many phone components, and I wouldn't sell as many phones. Now I am poorer, and the component seller is poorer, and the person I didn't hire is poorer, and someone out there doesn't get a phone. And the economy sees a little less influx of activity from everything we might have done and ended up not doing. Everyone is worse off.
But! If some policies are put in place to encourage me (somehow) to hire people that I might not normally consider due to my biases, then I might change my mind, and everyone wins more again.
So where does the money come from? I might be hanging onto some, hoping to hire some people, but I'm not spending as much as I would if I was hiring people I'm biased against. Or maybe some other companies besides mine hire more people that often face bias, and those companies expand and produce more and their new employees spend more buying all kinds of things (including the stuff my company makes), so my company gets buoyed up and now I have cash to spend to hire more people too. Or maybe I see the policy changes and decide I want to expand my business, so I seek out some investment or take out a loan.
The reason equality -enhancing policies are beneficial to everyone is that they make the total market bigger, faster. Money in a healthy economy doesn't run out and disappear; it flows. And if it flows productively to people who are currently relatively neglected in this regard, then everyone ends up better off, including the people who are not neglected in this regard.
> If this situation was actually zero-sum, then employees would get paid for a while until companies ran out of money, and then no one would ever get paid again.
You may not have noticed it but you just described an economic depression. During a depression people build up excessive amounts of savings which then aren't being spent, that money is quite literally missing from the economy. Companies eventually run out of money and fire their employees. As idle production capacity is being removed the cost of goods goes up again and those savers saved for nothing. So now you have this boom and bust cycle nonsense.
Why does anyone pay anyone else to do work for them? If this situation was actually zero-sum, then employees would get paid for a while until companies ran out of money, and then no one would ever get paid again. Fortunately, this is not a zero-sum situation, and people pay other people to do work in order to produce more value for the people paying for the work than they pay for the work.
For example, if I pay you $50 to put together $50 worth of components into a phone, I then go and sell that phone for more than $100. You get $50, whoever sold me the components gets $50, I get my sell price - $100 for the phone, and whoever buys it gets a shiny new phone. Everybody wins.
And it goes further! Everyone who made money takes their money and spends it on things other people have produced via their hard work -- or they invest it with some people for those people to try to make something more of that investment. Or they sit on it and spend it later, because they don't know what they want to spend it on right now. Whatever they do, the entire economy gets some action... eventually.
But let's say I'm kind of racist and sexist and biased in all kinds of ways and not necessarily aware of all the ways in which I'm biased, aka an actual human being. Then I might decide not to even consider hiring some people, because I think they wouldn't be able to do the work, when in reality they might do just fine, but my biases are getting the better of me. Then I might not hire as many people, and so I wouldn't pay as many workers to make phones, and I wouldn't pay for as many phone components, and I wouldn't sell as many phones. Now I am poorer, and the component seller is poorer, and the person I didn't hire is poorer, and someone out there doesn't get a phone. And the economy sees a little less influx of activity from everything we might have done and ended up not doing. Everyone is worse off.
But! If some policies are put in place to encourage me (somehow) to hire people that I might not normally consider due to my biases, then I might change my mind, and everyone wins more again.
So where does the money come from? I might be hanging onto some, hoping to hire some people, but I'm not spending as much as I would if I was hiring people I'm biased against. Or maybe some other companies besides mine hire more people that often face bias, and those companies expand and produce more and their new employees spend more buying all kinds of things (including the stuff my company makes), so my company gets buoyed up and now I have cash to spend to hire more people too. Or maybe I see the policy changes and decide I want to expand my business, so I seek out some investment or take out a loan.
The reason equality -enhancing policies are beneficial to everyone is that they make the total market bigger, faster. Money in a healthy economy doesn't run out and disappear; it flows. And if it flows productively to people who are currently relatively neglected in this regard, then everyone ends up better off, including the people who are not neglected in this regard.