TL;DR – How do I show the owners the business they are taking for granted is about to fail because the employees they have completely overloaded will be leaving? (8 of 10 employees that work there would be leaving, that would be ALL full time employees and ALL employees who generate revenue)
More info (rambling, sorry!) –
I work at a recycling warehouse in the United States (if I mentioned the state it would be fairly easy to figure out where I am located and I know that my co-workers/the owner also use reddit).
There is so much potential for my workplace to be fun and extremely profitable, if the owners (husband and wife) would just actually listen to their employee's suggestions. As of late they are using one of the wife's health issues to excuse her from any work at all and the husband's to about 10% of what it was. Yet they have engineered things so that they are the final decision makers for every single department and insist (even when they aren't physically in the office) that they still be the only ones to manage tasks.
We have about 10 employees not including the owners and everyone has agreed that there are small changes that could be made to improve this place but it will take both of the owners delegating tasks and committing to certain employees having the final say on tasks. They're terrified of firing anyone, yet there are several employees who definitely should be replaced and at this point their hourly rate is just a rolling cost they pay to avoid conflict.
Overall, this is just a super frustrating situation and employees are talking about a “strike” or some sort of walk out over this because there hasn't been any solutions after repeated serious discussions with 8 out of the 10 employees about quitting. We all want the company to do well, but the owners need to wake the fuck up or they're going to get themselves into some serious trouble unless they suddenly learn to do the jobs that bring money into the company. Currently, they have no idea how the ecommerce or retail side of the business works, yet these COMPLETELY support the company and they have said this themselves. They've actively been trying additional employees for over a year without success, so it's not like any of us are truly replaceable at this point.
So, the question I have is what can we as employees do to drive home that if the frustrated employees leave, their company will fail?