Antiwork
Date Created: June 21, 2023
This community supports labor, with an aspiration for it to cease to be required to live our lives. Members of this community want to end work, are curious about ending work, want to get the most out of a work-free life, want more information on anti-work ideas and/or want personal help with their own jobs/work-related struggles.
Anti-Work Library 📚
Essential Reads
Start here! Some of the more talked-about essays on the topic.
- The Abolition of Work by Bob Black (1985) | listen
- On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber (2013) | listen
- In Praise of Idleness by Bertrand Russell (1932) | listen
c/Antiwork Rules
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Social Media products such as Twitter/X and Meta Properties (e.g. Facebook, Instagram, Threads) are known low quality information sources - they actively spread misinformation without sufficient moderation, hate speech. These platforms each have billionaire owners working actively to eliminate labor protections through direct action, lobbying, performative large scale layoffs and attacks on institutions that enforce labor law.
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Antiwork Suggested Communities
Server status for big servers http://lemmy-status.org/
Active stats from all Antiwork instances
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possibly, just possibly, if CEOs weren't pathologically greedy then you'd be able to pay your workers what they are worth and wouldn't have this 'it's too expensive' worry to keep you from doing the right thing
https://www.restaurantbusinessonline.com/financing/mcdonalds-ceo-chris-kempczinski-got-big-raise-last-year
I have a bigger issue with the billions they spend every year in stock buybacks. Last year, it was $4B. That's an additional 20k per employee.
That sounds nice and all, but if he gave up his 20m/yr and gave it to employees.. everyone would get an extra $100 per year.
There are some parts I agree with this, because if we did calculate the profits and gave all the profits generated for 2022, we would end up only being able to give the average worker a raise to $16.20 an hour divided over 1.35 million employees.
But that is part of the problem. McDonalds has become too heavy for American workers to save it. It is over franchised.
McDonald competes using the "Walmart strategy" Where they under price the competition until no one can compete and are forced to close.
But times have changed.
This business model doesn't work when workers have options for good paying jobs.
$15 * 1,350,000 = $20,250,000 per hour for all employees per hour.
McDonald made in profits 14 billion in 2023
Assuming McDonalds took that 14 billion and gave it all to the employees.
(14,000,000,000 / 365)/24 = 1.6 million per hour divided over 1,350,000 million employees give or take.
Add that to the original
$20,250,000 + 1,600,000 = 21,850,000 / 1,350,000 = $16.18 per hour.
Note: this does not include stock buybacks as those are not ready for 2023, but I imagine around 2 billion extra we could dig out of those expenses. Also I do not know the overall executive pay. I can tell you the CEO's pay, and even the average, but I have no Idea what that total number is.
In all, I have tried to keep the math consistent, Please criticize the math, as I still feel like I have done something wrong.
I didn't want this conclusion. But if it is true. The Food industry is going to need to raise it's prices and stop overpaying it's CEOs. Or small Family owned businesses that don't have those constraints will outpace them in the next few years.
Edit: If you want more context and made it this far, check out _healththetank's post below, it adds a little bit more understanding on what I got wrong.
You're paying employees 24hrs a day, 365 days a year. They should be paid, assuming standard full time (which most of them are not), 40hrs per week, 52 weeks per year or 2,080 hours.
14,000,000,000/2080 = 6,730,769 per hour over 1.35 million staff = a raise of $5 per hour, putting the new hourly rate at $20/hr. Not way higher, but worth noting.
Additionally, as I mentioned above, the assumption of 40hrs per week for all staff is highly unlikely to be accurate. I looked, but wasn't able to find any hard data, just anecdotal stuff. Most staff I know in fast food places work ~30hrs per week, if they're 'full time', so the number is likely higher than I've shown.
Therefor it is entirely possible, even without touching the CEO pay, to pay $20 per hour to all staff.
Thank you so much!
There is also the assumption that everyone would be paid $20 when in fact they would probably fall in a range of $16 - $18 with the extremely rare $19-$20
I knew the math wasn't adding up somewhere, otherwise the new UPS contracts would bust the company.
I agree with your points, I was speaking in reference to the 20m/yr CEO salary. Over 200k employees, that only comes out to $100 per person. As you've demonstrated, it takes a lot more than just paying CEOs less.
How did $4bn become $20mn in your head?
When I read it off of the person's post I replied to. Can you show me where you saw 4bn in EpicMuch's comment? Or did you just feel like lashing out over something you barely read? How did you think your comment would be useful?
It’s not just CEO pay. CEO pay is certainly a symptom of the upward transfer of wealth, and it’s quite harmful in its own ways, but simply dividing the pay of a CEO among N employees isn’t going to change much at most companies.
As far as charging more per product goes, that becomes a question of what the per unit labor costs are. An old (2015) report from Perdue estimated that doubling the minimum wage of $7.25 and offering health insurance would raise prices at a place like McDonald’s about 4.5% and tripling it would raise prices 22%. These are generally fairly complex formulas and incorporate factors like federal offsets for health insurance.
The Big Mac is the universal product for a lot of these things. The ingredients for a big mac cost less than $1. The estimate I saw from McD was $0.77. That’s the raw material cost. The other costs are things like rent, electricity, advertising, labor, and so on. What we would need is an accurate estimate of the labor component of the big mac price and multiply it by 1.33 or whatever the labor increase is and see what the new total cost is. If labor is 10% of the cost, then on a $10 big mac the labor is $1. Increasing the paid wage from $15 to $20 would raise the price of a big mac to $10.33.
But even that is overestimating the impact, because the actual big mac sandwich is one of the lower profit margin items. Fries and sodas have massive profit margins, so the total impact of a wage increase per order would be even lower because the cost would be spread over high margin items as well.
Current supply chain problems (and price gouging) has shifted cost of goods even further away from labor as a component.
So overall, without them actually opening the books on their cost of goods, I’m going to guess that the drama they’re enacting over their business model is BS, just like it was whe the minimum wage was raised to $15 in CA.
That does not change the fact that nobody deserves to be paid what CEOs are being paid. That’s the point.