Figured out how much surplus labor my coworkers and I are losing
Figured out how much surplus labor my coworkers and I are losing
I work in a blue collar field related to fossil fuels (sorry, I'm just another totally innocent death star worker). At a recent meeting one of our bosses mentioned that our "market" (i.e., the county we work in) has 20,000 customers paying the company. I guessed that each customer is paying somewhere around $100/month when you factor in fossil fuel deliveries + service to their dogshit fossil fuel burners (there is no such thing as a good fossil fuel burner).
So 20,000 x 100 = $2,000,000 per month.
Divide by roughly 50 employees (generous estimate) = $40,000 per employee per month, assuming each employee does roughly the same amount of necessary labor.
I heard long ago that good capitalists devote one third of "earnings," i.e, gross surplus labor, to profit, one third to overhead, and the last third to labor. I know this isn't always necessarily true, but let's just assume that one third of that $40,000 per month is going toward buying supplies / paying taxes / doing upkeep on vehicles / anything else that can be considered overhead.
$40,000 / 3 = $13,333
$40,000 - $13,333 = $26,667 for profit and labor per employee per month.
I work about 20 days per month. $26667 / 20 = $1333 per day, nearly $200 per hour of labor. This is what I would presumably be making if the business were a worker co-op, all other things being equal. They currently pay me $25/hr, which is the median salary in the USA and only enough to tread water at best without my spouse's income. (My spouse has a union and makes two or three times as much money as I do, and her union sucks, but a shitty union is way better than none at all.) So basically, the company owners are stealing about 90% of my earnings from me.
I have mentioned unionizing to many of my coworkers. (White males do delivery and service, while about eight white women and about five white guys work in the office.) Maybe one coworker expressed interest in unionizing, and that was after I had been working alongside him and propagandizing the fuck out of him for like a month. The rest were pretty much not interested. Isn't this great?
The company also spans multiple states and many counties within these states, so the owners are stealing something like tens of millions of dollars from their workers per month, and that's not counting the cost of environmental destruction and the fact that they're probably pumping a lot of this money into the genocide industry.