This is the meme com so maybe I should ask elsewhere, but isn't the rate of exploitation roughly 100% in most places? Idk if that's also the case for the imperial periphery, but at least from what I remember from reading Towards a New Socialism that number sounds right. So getting paid for 50% of the value you create is roughly what we have now, no?
I once worked in the oilfield. I was paid $100 as a day rate, at the time it was some of the best money I made. I once saw what I was contracted out as - they were charging husky energy $300 a day for me (a greenhand). Husky was still making tons of money so that must've been a good deal for them.
Once, there was a story about a small time pizza joint where the boss "rewarded" his workers with all the money the place made split between them. They made, I think, 3x what they made in wages. Labour cost is usually 33% at high end restaurants, lower at cheaper places - labour cost is the percentage of wages paid out compared to sales made it doesn't include rent or food/capital.
I’ve worked in bars for years and most bosses I’ve known aimed for like 15-20% wages lol. Post-Covid lockdown for a while there we were doing more like 10-12% even. I’ve worked on a lot of skeleton crews.
Yeah my boss got in trouble if it ever went over 20%, and was supposed to keep it under 15%.
Weird how we were consistently short staffed.
It depends. Someone with a good union job could be getting as much as 70-80% of the value they produce, while other jobs are well below 50%. It gets hard to work out because a lot of corporate payroll is non-productive overseers, and in some cases you can get weird things like software engineering where very highly paid workers may still be producing many times their pay in value although there there's an argument that a lot of the material production that enables that is massively undercompensated which would change the calculation a lot if it could be quantified (that is to say the tools they use rely on externalized costs and slave wages in the periphery, on infrastructure built and maintained by underpaid workers in the core, etc), not to mention that in many cases the "value" itself isn't real but is instead just financial smoke and mirrors so to speak.
2-3x is normal in tech, if pay rates for contractors (as billed to the contracting company) vs what you can actually via a salary are anything to go by. companies literally charge 125-150 an hour to each other to contract developers then turn around and pay them 50-75/hr.
