And you can't answer the question "why now" Did companies just decide to start making profits? Did they not have profits before a few years ago? People all of a sudden became greedy?
the answer to that question is so simple and so easy and so obvious the reason it isn't directly answered is because the only assumption one can make about why you'd ask it in the first place is that you're either being intentionally obtuse for the purposes of generally being a dickbag, or you're literally physically retarded - and since nobody thinks either of those things about you, it's assumed you're asking it ironically.
corporate profits have been going up fairly steadily since the industrial revolution because of... the industrial revolution.
technological advancements make the production side more efficient, and make the logistics side of the service industry easier and cheaper.
A. "cost to run the business (including R&D, manufacturing, payroll, all the myriad costs of running a company) subtracted from B. net earnings from the company's offerings to equal C. "profit."
the lower that A is relative to B, the more profit a company makes. herpa. fucking. derp.
nobody objects to a company making a profit, and i doubt you'd find anyone but the most bizarrely out there who would argue against the idea of company's being able to increase profits.
the issue comes from the question of how much is reasonable to expect a company to reinvest C. into A., specifically as relates to employee wages.
a prime example:
for at least the last 30 years every consumer survey has noted that Coke is the most globally recognized corporate brand on the planet, where something like 94% of every single human on this planet knows about coke.
approximately 1.7% of all the liquid consumed in an average days on Earth is a coke product.
of the 33 top grossing non-alcoholic beverages in existence, 15 of them are owned by Coke.
and yet, in 2010, Coke spent 2.9 billion dollars in advertising.
... so think of this like the argument against military spending: it's not that the people arguing against the size of the military budget are against the government or government spending, they just have an issue with where all the money is going.