Yes, these show the amorality of the profit motive: whatever's legal in whatever country, do it.
We in the West tend to reserve our outrage at companies that break the rules of good conduct here... and ignore what's going on elsewhere.
This article puts some of the basics well:
The NFL’s Recession Parable -- New York Magazine Quote: While the NFL lockout lacked the simple good-versus-evil dynamics of, say, a Jets-Patriots game, it also wasn’t tough to pick a side. After years of record profits, NFL owners proposed that players accept an eighteen-game schedule—the equivalent of two weeks of brain-scrambling unpaid overtime—and take what amounted to an 18 percent pay cut. Unlike the NBA owners, who recently launched their own lockout, the NFL didn’t really try to argue that teams weren’t making money; instead, the argument was that teams weren’t as profitable as they could (and, ergo, should) be. The biggest obstacle being, as usual, those needy employees, a labor force that, in the NFL and the NBA, also happens to be the league’s very popular product.
The perceived right to an ever-fatter bottom line isn’t a new idea, but it’s not an old one, either. Depending on your perspective, the last two decades, and especially the past three years, have either created or justified a view of employees as a disposable component of a bigger *profit-making machine, as something that can be managed “as a variable input,” in the words of a recent *McKinsey Global Institute report. And so, amid a jobless recovery that comes amid record corporate cash stockpiles, the NFL’s genetic-lottery winners and their billionaire bosses somehow became outsize proxies for the strife in the non-jock workplace.
The point here is: of course corporations are going to argue for more profit. But just because some business
could be more profitable should not automatically mean it
should be.
The idea that corporations perform a social service: provide employment, make stuff, move money piles around, ensure trading, etc etc should not mean that government or other interests don't have a place at the table. If you have kids, just because they grumble about your rules doesn't mean you cave in to their grumbling after all.
I still have trouble with the MMT idea that only government spending creates any money, i.e. value. So what does private business do? Is there truly no alternative to ever expanding 'deficits' under this system?