If you work at Timmy’s do a count of how many ice caps you make in a day. Multiply that by the cost. I guarantee on ice caps alone you make more value than you get back in your check
Libs learn about the labor theory of value and are like, “so what if people skim a little off the top? The business has overhead.” This is not skimming. Most people lose more than half of their labor value every day.
Serious Question : How do you calculate these values in occupations that aren't purely transactional like this?
So say like imagine a Software Programmer, or even more specific and limited something like Tech Support or Customer Service.
Without seeing the numbers at the top I'm struggling to figure out a way for a worker at like a tech support call center to actually figure out how much value they're providing the multi-national corporation they're doing support for.
If there are specific service contracts in your industry: If you don't know the prices that your employer charges for the service contracts and the profits they make, you could instead refer to industry standards. Chances are you'll be pretty close with that. That information is sometimes made public by certain organizations (sometimes corporations themselves, maybe unions, maybe independent economic research departments etc... at least in my part of the world). If you're a bit more bold you might be able to act like an interested customer with another similar company and just ask about prices via phone call or e-mail. If there aren't generally service contracts, it would probably be included in the product price, so you would have to find out how much profit is made from each sale, and how much of the work that goes into it overall is just for support (like 2% or 5% or whatever), which is probably tricky. On the other hand, sometimes it's enough to know how much profit a corp made, and how many employees it has. How much more money would everyone have if the profit was equally distributed to each employee? Not that that would necessarily be practical, but it's also a good way to paint a picture imho
See how much they charge for tech support as a line item. If they won’t tell you what the standard price is now you know why because the sales department definitely has one. If you work at a tech company as a programmer there’s a good chance the value you create is the majority of the company’s value as the core product so just take the company’s profits for that year, cut in half, and divide by the number of programmers for a low ball
You can look at what professional service companies charge for consultant. For engineers, it's $100-$150 an hour in the US, sometimes more for software or really specialized work. Tech support and customer service are lower than that, but it's hard to say because there's a big difference between tech support for niche scientific software or lab equipment vs tech support for your iPhone.
Compare that to how much you make in wages and benefits, and remember that if your company doesn't actually bill time to customers, your labor is more valuable than whatever the charge-out rate is for a consultant because you can do things faster (you know the place you work, your co-workers, etc).