What workers want: raises that beat inflation

Re:What workers want: raises that beat inflation by jerf on Wednesday June 15, 2022 @11:49AM (#31754825)

A lot of people think that companies aren't paying their employees well because they're greedily hording cash and if they'd just give that cash to their employees, wealth problems would be solved. I would suggest to these people to spend some time looking at the largest companies in the world, taking their profits for the year, and dividing by the number of employees they have. I have done this exercise a few times. It will open your eyes about a lot of things w.r.t. business.

We here on HN are the ones who need to do this most of all because we work in the industries and companies that have for the last 10 years actually made enough money that the division results in something significant. This is not the norm. You can easily end up with values in the hundreds of dollars of profit/employee for a more normal industry. Even if the profits were 100% shared, we aren't necessarily talking about pulling people out of poverty or something.

The parasite class in society is smaller than you think, percentage-wise. Quite a lot of us go to supporting just one of them. I think getting rid of them would be a great boon... but not because simply redistributing their wealth would solve very much. The real problem they create is that they steal $X dollars and end up creating second-order effects that mean $X·Y dollars of wealth are never created in the first place, where Y is pretty significant.

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Re:What workers want: raises that beat inflation by c22 on Wednesday June 15, 2022 @01:08PM (#31756016)

I just tried this with 10 random companies from the tail end of the s&p 500, I didn't cherry pick anything:

                                 2021 profit   # employees  profit/employee
  DISH Network Corporation        $ 6.143B        16,000        383,937
  FOX Corporation                 $12.909B         9,000      1,433,333
  Wynn Resorts Limited            $ 1.205B        30,200         39,735
  American Airlines Group         $ 2.046B       123,400         16,580
  Bath & Body Works Inc           $ 3.096B        92,300         33,542
  Hasbro Inc                      $ 6.42B          5,600      1,146,428
  Advance Auto Parts Inc          $ 4.929B        68,000         72,485
  MGM Resorts International       $ 9.68B         74,500        129,932
  Hormel Foods Corporation        $ 1.928B        20,000         96,400
  Paycom Software Inc             $ 0.89B          5,385        165,273

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What workers want: raises that beat inflation by seafoam on Wednesday June 15, 2022 @01:25PM (#31756248)

American Airlines LOST $2Bln in 2021.

I just spot-checked 1 randomly, and didn't cherry pick.

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Re:What workers want: raises that beat inflation by c22 on Wednesday June 15, 2022 @01:50PM (#31756617)

Goes to show the accuracy of the google info box!

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Re:What workers want: raises that beat inflation by rightbyte on Wednesday June 15, 2022 @12:56PM (#31755824)

For Amazon 2021 it seems like quite alot though.

33,3 billion USD profits/1,622,000 employees = 20k USD/employee

The median employee made 29k in 2020.

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employee-salary-pay-m...

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Re:What workers want: raises that beat inflation by queuebert on Wednesday June 15, 2022 @06:24PM (#31760199)

Maybe they have a lot of part-time employees.

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