I had a similar argument the other day with some capitalist asshole I know. He kept saying “do you want your fries at McDonald’s to be $30?”. Did the math for him and showed him that if McDonalds gave every single employee of theirs $5 raise, it’ll cost them ~ $250mil, and their profit for the year was $6b. He didn’t say a single word after that.
If you’re gonna “do the math” for someone you should probably do it correctly. I don’t know where you got this figure from. In 2022, McDonald’s employed ~200,000 people. There are 2080 working hours (52 weeks * 40 hours) in a year.
200,000 * 2080 * 5 = $2.08 billion
Of course, this is still an affordable amount of money for McDonald’s, but it is significantly more (about 8 times) than what you say it is.
You’re assuming that all of their employees are full time employees.
and you’re assuming that all of their employees work 5 hours a week. Which one is more realistic?
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Damn, you turned him into a mute
Fuck them and fuck their bullshit. They’re just assholes who want everything for themselves.
It’s disgusting how greedy and petty these multi-million dollar companies are that they won’t even remotely play fair with the people who actually make them all their money. Even worse they are hoping a few well paid AI programmers can eliminate the need for writers all together.
Take to the high seas and don’t give those bastards a cent!
There is a big distinction between multi-million and multi-billion companies that needs to be pointed out here.
Autocorrect. Should have been multi-billion.
All good! I think it’s important to understand the obscene difference between a million and a billion dollars so I always try to point it out just in case.
Be interesting to add 2 more columns the C suite compensation packages and their percentage of income. Might help give people more context.
This is a great post,
but I’d argue that evaluating the company’s net profit is better as it’s the actual profits the company makes at the endEdit: Nope, revenue is more important. See this postRevenue is used because this industry is notorious for “Hollywood accounting” to avoid having any actual profits to avoid residuals based on net.
Some of the biggesr blockbusters of all time are, thanks to Hollywood accounting, net losers. Forrest Gump is a classic example: it made almost a billion dollars in revenue vs a $55 million budget. But thanks to tax evasion techniques the movie is actually a huge financial loser on paper, losing more than $65 million if you look at net.
You can’t trust non-workers, who exist entirely off the wealth they can cheat out of workers, to be honest.
So that is why gross revenue is used in Hollywood.
Edit: to add on to that Gump example, the author was supposed to be paid based on net. He got totally fucked which is why no sequel was made. His IP created a billion+ dollars out of thin air, but blood sucking capitalist parasites leech it all away with tax evasion.
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Great breakdown! Given that this is Lemmy and we trend toward more tech focused, people might gel better with Apple and Microsoft. If anyone is confused about what you wrote but the my understand big tech tax evasion, it is basically the same set of steps.
Big tech just doesn’t pay residuals.
Apple is well known for their Irish tax haven holding all of their IP and other rights so Apple can lease it back from themselves and account for pure profit as expenses. That’s also how Amazon pays little to no taxes. Or sometimes these company’s pay negative tax rates meaning they get government welfare to buy billionaires fudge rounds presumably, in conservative populist parlance.
Also to add on to my earlier comment, after some research it appears that the standard union contract prior to the strike has always been based on gross revenue instead of net. So it is consistent with why the WGA put this out.
Big tech just doesn’t pay residuals.
Although, as the chart shows, Apple is also a production company now, so it also needs to start paying residuals.
Hollywood accounting doesn’t apply to studios that are publicly traded, only their projects. But anyway, because they’re public, we know what their profits are:
2022 profits
- Disney (NYSE: DIS) $28.321 billion
- Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX) $12.447 billion
- Warner Brothers Discovery (NASDAQ: WBD) $13.375 billion
- Paramount Global (NASDAQ: PARA) $10.309 billion
- NBC Universal/Comcast (NASDAQ: CMCSA) $44.951 billion
- Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) $-2.722 billion
- Sony (NYSE: SONY) “Almost $7 billion”
- Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) $99.8 billion
Some thoughts:
- Some of these are obviously corporate figures and don’t necessarily reflect how well the production department of each corp is doing. Still, it reflects the fact that these corporations could easily (well, mostly) absorb the costs of what SAG-AFTRA/WGA are asking for.
- Sony has all their fiscal year information published but not collated by calendar year, and I couldn’t be bothered to dig it up myself, so I just took their word for it.
That’s really interesting. Thanks for explaining that, it was something I was totally unaware of. Now I have changed my mind and I think the WGA listed the right numbers.
Revenue is better. Actual profits is very hard to measure since the numbers are obfuscated. These companies often stash their IP rights in a tax haven under a different company. Like how Apple uses the island of Jersey. End of the year the offshore company sends a massive license fee bill and boom their taxable income is slashed significantly.
“Ah I see now!” said the blind man Seriously though, that makes a lot more sense about why they use revenue instead of net profit
I agree, but that came directly from a WGA statement.
Thank you for sharing! I probably wouldn’t have seen it otherwise.
Well, no since this should be considered one of the expenses the companies will have to pay, revenue is the appropriate metric. I wouldn’t judge the cost to switch from aluminum to carbon fiber at Boeing against its profits, I’d measure it against revenue
Yes but if we give in now, where will it stop? - the execs
