No, it’s a fine reflection of production and labor costs.
It’s a poor representation of development costs and total costs for a product. No doubt a part of the picture is missing, because it’s not like he’s producing the thing then it goes right on to store shelves and people buy it up by the truckload right from where he works. Any reasonable person should be able to surmise that he shouldn’t earn so much that he can buy 3000 of them from one hour of labor where he produces 3000 of them… There’s packaging (even if they’re just hucked into a box, it’s still a package), material costs, the development costs not only of the part, but of the machinery to make the part, transportation of the raw material and finished product, sales, marketing, management, and losses from defective, malformed or otherwise unsellable units that need to be disposed of or recycled.
Every part of that costs money and there’s probably a bunch of stuff I’ve left out, meanwhile, the image does not even remotely discuss any of it, but with everything that’s made, it’s generally understood that he’s not going to make 3000 things worth of money per hour.
That’s not the point and it never was.
The point is there is a 1000 fold difference in what he makes vs what he’s making; and it doesn’t take a lot of brainpower to realize that he’s not being compensated fairly for his efforts in creating those… Things. Wtf are they anyways? … Doesn’t matter, he should make more per unit than 1/1000th the selling price.
Bluntly, that’s pretty obvious to me and IMO, that’s obvious to the majority of people who see this. Pointing out that he didn’t pay for the R&D is a strawman argument at best.
I agree completely with the sentiment, but I have to disagree with one part: “Any reasonable person should be able to surmise…”
If we take “reasonable” to mean “average” then you are dead wrong. It’s been my experience that most people have no clue at all about supply chains or how products make it to them. If they buy a thing at a store for $50, they believe that the store has made $50. Retail is a terrible place to be.
He probably is underpayed, but that image does not make any reasonable argument to issue. It illustrates labor division if anything at all. If I am the last one on the assembly line of Ford, wondering why I can’t afford ten cars an hour is just idiotic.
Again, he probably is underpaid, and people are probably making too money from his work, but that doesn’t make that image make sense.
But he’s not making a car, at all. That example doesn’t really work.
In the image post, the item he’s making appears to be so simple that it’s unlikely that more than one person needs to work on making the part, meanwhile, relating to large complex consumer goods like a passenger vehicle, #1 they produce far fewer of them per hour, per production line, and several people are involved…
Which is slightly different scaling.
The beauty of the example that was originally provided is that it’s a one-man job. He’s responsible for creating them - all by himself… So his contribution, directly results in 3k of that item per hour, alone. This, IMO, very clearly shows how underpaid he is for his work. While he gets 100% of the revenue of 0.1% of his output as compensation, the other 99.9% of revenue is material, R&D, sales, transport, and (probably the largest share is) profit… To stockholders… Who did nothing in the process of the creation of the product being sold, and reap the benefits of this workers high level of productivity.
Therein lies the point. The vast majority of the revenue generated from his work is going to people who didn’t have anything to do with the production process.
I don’t think any reasonable person would say he should be paid 1:1 for it, but certainly more than 1000:1. Maybe 100:1? Or something? IDK. I’d have to look at the full picture to see what makes sense, something that his management should be doing, but they’re clearly more interested in maximizing profits, rather than supporting their employees.
I get your point, and I might agree, but again: That image doesn’t make that point. It this was a cooperative where all profits are share equally, it would look the same. Maybe he could afford 4 or 5, big deal. Point remains, he thinks he makes the things, whatever they are, but he doesn’t. He does one step in a huge chain of steps. The materials, the machine, the logistics, the R&D. You even acknowledge it, but you boil it down to only the stockholders. Which, again, do profit, and, again, that’s a thing one might discuss. But you make it sound like that’s the main issue here, when it’s not. Margins are not that high.
It isn’t immediately obvious to libs that want healthcare though. They much prefer blindly defending a process they have only one data point on.
At the end of day, even if you assume this is the most efficiently run business in existence with everyone being fairly and equitably compensated for their skill, time, risk, and effort, he would still be owed 4 instead simply by elimination of the capitalist’s unearned share.
None of what you said, made any sense to me. Your sentence structure sucks, you seem to be using new and unheard of short hand for common words that don’t need to be shortened, and you seem to be taking a political stance on something that’s not inherently a political issue.
So I say good day to you sir.
