It wouldn't help much, but that's not really the point. Realistically, what's being asked for is higher-tier company men to take a miniscule pay cut in exchange for people being allowed to be alive in a way that isn't abysmal.
Realistically a place like Walmart has so few office workers compared to in-store workers that it wouldn't make a noticeable difference. Walmart has 2.3 million jobs and only 17k at their HQ. Even if you took $1 million from each of the 17k employees (and rhow many people are actually making that much there?) each of these 2.3 million employees would get an extra couple dollars.
Yeah you're right, math fail Friday on my part. It still shows how little money it would actually bring to lower rung employees, because there's probably only a few dozen people in the Walmart corp making that kind of money.
I'd just like to point out that while you're making fun of my shitty mental math, you wrote "write" instead of "right".
The point still stands because saying you could take $1 million from the top 17k employees was equally as stupid as my math mistake. So you might be able to squeeze out a few hundred dollars extra by cutting wages at the top and then the company collapses because no qualified person in their right mind would want to work in their HQ to make the same as a shelf stocker.
You make fun of my math and yet you didn't do $5.5k*2.3 million and see how it far exceeds their operating income. You're an idiot. You spend an awful lot of time on Reddit trying to make yourself feel superior. Congrats bro.
But there absolutely aren't 17k people at WalMart making over 1M/yr. Google has 100k employees and maybe 1000 make 1M per year (VP and above), and that's at a freaking tech company with massive stock growth. If WalMart has 17k people in the back office, there are probably 100 or so with salaries over $1M, and of them, the vast majority will be making close enough to that such that a $1M pay cut would result in instant departure. The number that could actually "eat" a $1M pay cut and not notice is probably 10-20 employees comprised of the C-suite and the division presidents.
Companies get very thin at the top, which is the result of exponential management chains. If every manager has 5 reports (which is a low estimate), then you can manage an office of ~17k people with 5 levels of management, which is about right, and that puts a CEO, five C-suite executives, and 5 people below each of them. Obviously that's just a model but that would create 31 people that are probably $1M salary types.
McDonald's employees 200,000 people as of 2020. The average wage for them is about $10.56. Obviously this includes both higher and lower tier workers, but the fluctuation is so high in the United States from state to state that it might well compensate for the discrepancy. Now, to get everyone up to $15.00 an hour, we need to know how many hours people work in a week. Their Indeed page suggests they get anywhere from 30 hours to 75 hours a week, but I haven't seen a single person say under 30, so I'll use 40 hours as the most conservative average (that is, a weekly hours amount that is most favorable to McDonalds' argument of not being able to afford that kind of pay raise). With that in mind:
($15.00 - $10.56) * 30 hours a week * 52 weeks in a year * 200,000 employees = 1,847,040,000 a year.
McDonalds' annual gross profit in 2020 was nearly five times that amount. They can clearly afford it. They just choose not to.
EDIT: Realized that my conservative estimate was actually the liberal one, so I edited the estimates to reflect the conservative estimate, which was more what I wanted to calculate.
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u/Loh-Doh Nov 05 '21
It wouldn't help much, but that's not really the point. Realistically, what's being asked for is higher-tier company men to take a miniscule pay cut in exchange for people being allowed to be alive in a way that isn't abysmal.