I think the result Brian is getting is pretty accurate, but there are two things wrong with your calculation:
(a) You say that the burger flipper adds $1 to the value of each hamburger. Where does this number come from? To compute it you would need to subtract the cost of materials and equipment transferred to the burgers from the price of the burger. I don't see you doing this but the $1 seems to be a guess. Everything else you say is based on this guess. (b) You cannot use firm-data for this, because due to the equalization of the rates of profit, some of the surplus-value created by labor intensive firms shows up as profits of capital intensive firms. Both of these objections can be remedied if you use national income data. I tell my class that their wage is roughly half of the value created by their labor. I can back this up by the following simple calculation. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm total employment in the US is presently 142,974 thousand. With 52 weeks in the year, this means that 142974 x 52 = 7,434,648 thousand weeks, or 7.434648 billion weeks, are worked every year. According to the US Bureau of Economic Analysis, http://bea.gov/newsreleases/national/gdp/gdpnewsrelease.htm Gross Domestic Product in the third quarter of 2012 is at such a rate that for the whole year this would give $15,775.7 billion current dollars. Dividing this by the number of weeks gives a value produced per person-week of $15,775.7 / 7.434648 = $2121.92 in current dollars. Now the BLS gives the "median weekly earnings" as $760 per week. This comes from http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat39.pdf Dividing this gives 760 / 2121.92 = 35.8 percent. Including benefits, and making all the other adjustments which need to be made here one gets probably that average wages are a little less than half of the value created by the worker. I would agree that the wages at MacDonalds are probably only a third of the value created, because unskilled laborers are in a worse bargaining position. But it would be better to make the example with a so-called well-paying job, because even those get only about half of the value created by the worker. I made a very similar calculation for my class in 2007 using the exact same source data, see http://marx.economics.utah.edu/das-kapital/2007SP/1090.html and got a more favorable outcome for the workers: their earnings were 40.0 percent of value created. I think the difference can be explained by the speedup since the 2008 crash. Hans _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
