Crafty, may not want to confuse "better" with "good" (or rather "more" with "a lot").
As an analogy, putting money in the IF is now like investing $100 in something that pays out $1 per year. After 1,000 years, it's earned 10x the initial value sure, but you'll be dead before it makes enough to pay off the initial investment.
Let me put it this way:
Attach a timescale of how long you still expect to be around for, say 2 real years. The value of each dollar that goes into the IF is (earning ratio after 2 years * tax/contribution[health/edu] ratio of income) Say we average the tax/contribution ratio to 50%, which should be around what it is last I checked. Now the IF earnings after 2 real years is .02% per day or 14.6% of investment after 2 years... so that money you'll see is 7.3% of what goes into the IF. Now, the contributions into the IF don't seem to exceed 1% here from what I see right now. So after two years, you will earn an extra .073% on the increase in salaries... which is best thought of as an effective salary increase of 99.927% of the actual salary increase after IF contributions are taken into account.
Now, I'm pretty sure IF contributions might exceed 1% of income in a very well managed country. By the way, I also suspect that the ratio of contributions to income has gone down as well. Even if it doubles, that's still less than .15% of worker income that gets put in your pocket over 2 real years.
Now, based on previous observation (I really don't care enough to go back and do it all over again), ONLY profit from interest in the IF gets added to worker income for the month. The earnings from dividends go straight to increasing the size of the IF which means you don't directly see this. Even assuming that for each dollar you put in the IF it spends one year being used as part of a share strategy to increase the size of the IF averaging 1% (P/E ratio of 100, which is pretty good for an average), then that total goes to the fund earning interest for the second year. you will be earning 91.25% of what you'd earn if you left it as cash in the fund. For clarity: not 91.25% more, but 8.75% less. Which given the nature of the example, simply means that there probably isn't a good strategy for improving the return by much if at all.
If dividends actually work by adding the money to income to workers for the month, we're still talking low numbers, but the strat becomes more feasable since after two years you earn (assuming P/e average of 100)... 182.5% for each dollar put in over 2 real years, where you earned 7.3% earlier. Even so, given the small percentage of worker income that makes it to contributions, we're probably talking 2% of worker income that you see after 2 real years.
Which means 2% at best (if dividends go straight to worker income), less than 0.1% at worst (if dividends don't)... and more likely to be closer to 0.1% (since I'm pretty sure they don't).
These numbers are so small as to be almost meaningless in determining whether to raise salaries. Important to understand as well... the IF affects the ideal salary level of a corporation the same as any other factor. It doesn't create a completely separate high salary strategy.