For an honest answer, it’s because the green circle is too abstract. The others are numbers everyone sees on their paycheck.
If you work for a publicly traded company and wish to become radicalized, you can divide the year’s profits (plus money wasted on stock buybacks) by the number of employees to roughly estimate your personal green circle.
You might even add the CEO’s compensation to the numerator. I hear LLMs are ready for prime time.
I mean profit = revenue - expenses. I cheekily suggested unsubtracting some expenses, e.g. excessive CEO pay, before computing profit per employee.
Its not. How would a workers actual real productivity be in terms of market value?
If I designed the graphics for some part of your website, how much did my graphic impact the profits of the company? How would you go about figuring out how the HR department brings in sales? Add up all the costs of lawsuits you imagine might have happened without them?
An overly simplified calculation to show the rough scale of this is to take the reported annual net profit and divide that by the number of employees. This neglects many workers that work for subcontractors and capital reinvestment and so many things but let’s take Microsoft for an example in 2024. 92.75B / 228,000 workers = $406,798 per worker.
I mean I think it’s intentional that there’s not data on that sort of thing that is collected or made available. There are methods one could use to get a rough estimate; someone elsewhere in the comments suggested taking the reported yearly profit for the company and dividing it by the number of workers. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than what we’ve got right now which is just a big ol ‘shrug’.
But there is likely someone doing the math, even if they’'re just ballparking it and not making it public, because that’s how they justify paying everyone’s salary. It would not surprise me at all to learn that giant corporations have a pretty accurate accounting of the value created by each employee.
So how do we unlock the green part for ourselves instead of giving it all to a rich twat?
You become the thing you hate. Start a business.
Edit: I just want to clarify that this is supposed to be mostly an outrageous thing to be said. I did that on purpose. I may have forgotten a “/s” to make that clear. Not everyone has the aptitude, willingness, or care to create their own business. Depending on your line of work, it may be a near impossibility to do so, as others have articulated already.
I’m trying to make a social comment on the absurdity of our current capitalistic systems. While it’s true that you can keep 100% of what you produce as profit for yourself if you are independent, that doesn’t make the prospect any more viable as a course of action. However, having the “opportunity” to start a business and keep 100% of the profits is the excuse any capitalist would provide in this situation.
I suppose, saying “become the thing you hate” didn’t make it clear enough to everyone that this is supposed to be a mockery of capitalists.
Great idea. What kind of business, I wonder? Telecoms company? Bank? Train network? Carmaker? Steel refiner? Power plant? Newspaper? Mobile phone manufacturer? Television? Oh wait, all of those industries are already heavily rigged in favour of the status quo.
Or by “start a business” did you mean buy a van and hire a local school leaver to help you do some landscaping and HVAC?
I recognize what taxes pay for and I recognize even I get something from them. I dont mind that I live in one of the most taxed countries in the world because I’m not afraid of getting mugged every day, see no trash on the streets, have access to free healthcare and schools etc. Yeah, sure, the state is not an efficient way of doing things and it could be better but I also recognize that not everything is perfect. I don’t see the reason to completely gut the state, have no taxes and hope a for profit, privatized, system will be better just because the state is inefficient or theres some corruption. Not a good enough reason imo. I’d think differently if the problems were more dire, but they just arent. Not here at least.
Profit? What does that get me? Companies find ways to evade paying taxes on them, then invest into ventures that extract more money from its populace (like real-estate). I recognize profit is kind of the driving force of the economy… I mean money needs to flow to other companies in form of investments which creates jobs but this isn’t strictly a necessity. More often than not, its just hoarded by the top class. More often than not, its just theft. Profit is theft.
I get it, Henry David Thoreau also didn’t pay taxes because his government was using them to fight a war he didn’t support. Its gonna depend on the country. If you can’t vote what the taxes pay for, they are more akin to gangster style extortion.
In a company you always have people that don’t generate value itself, but are needed so you can freely work, like the IT.
The green part should still be smaller. However you can seize that part by going freelance.
In a company you always have people that don’t generate value itself, but are needed so you can freely work, like the IT.
Treating IT like a cost centre instead of a revenue centre is why companies cut them to the bone and then go all SurprisedPikachu.gif when something important breaks or when hackers tear the company apart and hold them for ransom.
IT can absolutely be a revenue centre, providing value along with the rest of the company. But most leadership simply cannot think like this. They don’t have the capability. In fact, the tired joke in IT goes something like this:
Everything is working. “What do we pay you guys for?”
Everything is on fire. “What do we pay you guys for?”
No, you’re thinking of the C-Suite at the top: the Parasite Class that Hoovers up the vast majority of the value created by the employees, while providing of themselves almost nothing of value to the company. Most of them can be trivially replaced by any average Joe off of the street which no material impact on the company itself. A large minority of them are so abysmally bad at their jobs that they leave behind a trail of broken or defunct companies while getting obscene “golden parachutes” with every departure that are larger than any worker’s entire lifetime earnings potential.
Between 1995 and 2021, on average, US companies spent 78 percent of their net income on paying shareholders https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/the-strategy-and-corporate-finance-blog/share-repurchases-still-dont-prop-up-value
Makes sense, since net income is what’s leftover after costs (including wages), and taxes?
