Capitalism and justice

How to Determine the Surplus Value of Your Labor

Find out how much you are being exploited by your employer with this simple experiment

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

Let’s imagine a hypothetical. Bob works at McDonalds. Bob is convinced that he is being underpaid at his current wage of $12 per hour. He is upset that McDonalds makes millions of dollars on his back.

But Bob’s not dumb. He realizes that the success of his company is due to more than his ability to flip burgers and serve customers. For instance, the building he works in represent millions of dollars in real estate investment that he is not involved with. It involves thousands of dollars in equipment. Millions of dollars and countless man-hours spent on marketing, prospecting, and advertising. Then, in order to be successful McDonald’s has built a system of cooking, packaging and serving customers to make the entire process seamless and consistent, not only within a single restaurant, but across thousands of franchises throughout the world. All of this required large investments of time and money at considerable personal risk.

So Bob decides to do an experiment. To see how much money his labor is worth at its current skill level he finds a way to ditch the real estate, the equipment, the benefits of…