Comment by vineyardmike | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vineyardmike | Hacker News Reader

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> I bet you also think that cutting executive salaries would somehow make major corporations like McDonalds be able to pay all of their workers a living wage. I would encourage you to do the math on that -- it literally never works out.

Ignoring the "franchising" model which explicitly breaks the local/corporate link of profits and costs...

- McD had a 12B in profits in 2022. - McD had ~2M in employees at franchises - McD employees make ~$12 an hour. Thats 24k a year at full-time. - I couldn't find just the executive salaries.

If you took those profits and distributed them to employees, thats a 25% increase.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MCD/mcdonalds/gros...

You're citing gross profits, when what you actually want to look at is net income, no? For 2022 that was about 6 billion.

So now we're talking about a 12.5% increase in wages, in exchange for the entirety of the net profits.'

The best part is that it is common practice not to give people full-time hours so that they don't qualify for benefits. So I imagine of those 2M employees, a huge amount aren't exactly getting a living wage even after that 12.5% increase.

> The best part is that it is common practice not to give people full-time hours so that they don't qualify for benefits

Gross profits are fine. We’ll leave the 25%. If people aren’t working full time (which was assumed in the calculation) then that means it’s >25% increase in salary. Seems pretty life changing to those employees tbh. Imagine a 25%-50% raise? Life changing to someone who is intentionally denied work so they can be denied benefits.

> You're citing gross profits, when what you actually want to look at is net income, no?

No, for one thing net income is after taxes, if that had been paid out in wages the taxes wouldn't have been assessed.

Sure, but then add on the franchisees profits and the land appreciation, and you're pretty damn near to a living wage from surplus alone.

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