Even profit is manipulated and funnelled back into “growth”.
Comment on How Long It Takes the Largest Companies in America to Make One Employee's Average Annual Salary
calcopiritus@lemmy.world 10 months ago
This infographic has a very big and obvious flaw: wages are not the only cost of a company.
If a company covers its wages costs in 1 day it doesn’t mean that it’s pocketing the remaining 363.
Instead of revenue, they should use wages+profit. This way we can see which companies take what part of the generated value for themselves.
Blackmist@feddit.uk 10 months ago
shalafi@lemmy.world 10 months ago
And we can pretty much double the numbers by what it actually costs to employ someone vs. what they are paid.
Want nice things like healthcare and other benefits, worker’s comp, unemployment insurance and the like?
Worked at a small payroll firm for 5-years. I was the IT manager, so not like I’m an expert, but I had a lot of questions and worked closely with payroll and accounting. Very eye opening.
If you get paid $15/hr., you probably cost the company $26-29/hr. And we had small clients like churches, restaurants, convenience stores, thrift shops, places paying shit wages and shit benefits. I make ~$80K with stunning benefits, so I figure my company’s actual cost to keep my ass in the seat is maybe $200K?
ricecake@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
Well, I think I’d rather see total employee compensation, rather than strictly wages.
I think mixing profit in would muddy the waters of what it’s showing, but salary+healthcare+other benefits would show it’s intent a little better.
HandBreadedTools@lemmy.world 10 months ago
That “flaw” you pointed out is the point of the infographic. It is literally just to visualize the proportion of revenue paid to employees. No one is saying that the rest of the revenue is straight up profit, I cannot even imagine how you came to that conclusion.
The revenue vs profit aspect is also difficult to measure. An example as to why is Amazon claimed it made no profit for years, because it reinvested all of the revenue it gained in addition to revenue that paid for operating costs. Are you going to believe Amazon’s claim? Most people would argue they did profit, and that reinvestment is still profiting, but that’s not how things are often measured.
calcopiritus@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Well, one could argue that since this community is called “work reform”, the point of this infographic is to make workers aware of how much more companies would pay them. This infographic does not accomplish that.
If your company buys a chair for 1000€ and you sell it for 1001€, the company got a revenue of 1001€. You cannot ask more than 1€ to be paid to you for it though, since the company would be losing money. That’s what is called a profit margin.
This infographic shows companies from a wide range of sectors, and a wide range of profit margins as if they were comparable. You cannot compare the wage/revenue ratio of a supermarket to a tech company, since they operate at different profit margins.
You can compare wage/(profit+wage) ratio though, as it measures which part of the pie goes to the workers and which to the company, and that is universal.
It is true that it’s hard to measure “profit”, but that fact doesn’t make this infographic any better.