Let’s get back to basics to illustrate what an incredibly bad idea the OP is expressing.
The drive for profits is the drive to make products better and cheaper than your competitors do. A corporation or any other business does not exist to be a welfare agency or to be a source of jobs. It exists to take ideas for products and implement and sell them to people who want to buy them. That it needs to pay people wages and give them careers and benefits is a result of the invisible hand, and not the prime motivation of the business.
Imagine how this would work in practice. You notice your market share falling. If you are focused on profits, what do you do? You perhaps redouble your efforts to regain market share. But maybe you’re just not good enough - your competitors have superior products or superior processes for making them, and people are increasingly choosing those products over yours.
The drive for profit leads you now to downsize. You can’t make profits supporting a workforce sized for a market share you no longer have. So you lay them off. You close offices, you shrink and regroup and rebuild and try to improve starting from a more sustainable corporate footprint.
Is this a bad thing? Not on your life. Not for society as a whole. Those workers you laid off were not productive in the job they held, and now they are free to seek other, more productive work. Other businesses with ideas can hire them and add value to the economy elsewhere. Ultimately, this is good for the workers, because when workers are employed in jobs where they are more productive they tend to earn more money and be more satisfied. But most importantly, all of this churn drives the economy towards the Pareto-optimal path. This is why capitalism is so good at building the wealth of nations.
In practice, if you decided you were going to favor the workers over profits, you’d soon find you have neither. Other businesses would out-compete you. Other businesses would be more attractive to investment. Customers don’t care about your employee’s retirement plan - nor should they. They care about maximizing the value of their own dollar and buying the best products they can with their money. And it’s best for society if they do that. We need customers to discriminate objectively on the merits of the goods they buy, if we want to send signals to corporations that they must provide the best products they possibly can to find a market.
Now let’s suppose you passed a law forcing all business to ‘put the employee first’. What would be the result? First, it would be impossible to manage and police. But let’s say you could. Businesses are now all protecting their employees and putting profits last. What would be the end result? Inefficiency. People employed in jobs where their skills are not utilized to their best advantage. Products would be shoddier and more expensive. The general standard of living would decline. It would be difficult to find investment money when you’re essentially asking investors to give to charity.
Just how much room do you think there is in ‘profits’? How much more generous can companies be? Let’s take a look at Wal-Mart, which some would accuse of being the most rapacious, bottom-feeding corporation out there. Surely they’re just swimming in money, right? They could easily afford to treat the employees much better, right?
In the last quarter, Wal-mart made $3.14 billion in profit. That represents 77 cents per share, and with a share at $56, that represents a whopping 1.4% of return on the money. An annualized rate of 5.6%. There is just not a lot of room in there to ‘take money out of profits’ before your company becomes completely unattractive to investors. But let’s say you did. Let’s give all $3.14 billion to the employees. How much do they get? Well, there’s about 2 million of them. That’s about $1500 each. $6,000 per year. And if the company did that, it would have no profits at all and cease to operate.
Corporations don’t run lean ships because they’re greedy - they run lean ships because they have to. The pressures of the market drive profits down to the point where the return on investment is slightly greater than the cost of the additional risk taken on by investing in something less stable than government bonds. Companies that make ‘excess profit’ usually find themselves being eaten by other companies more willing to work for a little less. So we’re currently not far from exactly where we should be with respect to overall corporate profits. Anything less, and corporations would become less viable.
And of course, we live in a global economy. Unless you can get the whole world to play this game, the result would be a decline in American competitiveness, and ultimately a much lower standard of living as consumers increasingly turn to exports to find value. Are you going to erect trade barriers to prevent that? If so, kiss another 20% of GDP goodbye.
Finally, if you’re talking about forcing businesses to do this, guess what that makes you? A fascist. The difference between fascism and communism is that communists want to own the commanding heights of the economy and run them, while fascists are content to let a private corporate sector retain ownership of the means of production - so long as they do everything the government directs them to do.