The cheap $3.99 big mac incorporates the value of the laboring worker anyway. The big mac price doesn't increase because the only difference is who gets the money. The price is already set by the labor-value contained in the big mac.

It also incorporates the slave labor of the Brazilian ranch hands at Marfrig where the beef comes from, the socialized economies of scale of the transport and processing, etc. The burger price is not related to the pay of the cashier except virtually, to the actual labor-output

So if we were to imagine the big mac, we could break every single one of them down to a labor-crystallization: each burger represents 1 cent of ranch labor, 5 cents of processing labor, 10 cents of transportation fees, 2 cents of electrical bills, 5 cents of cashier labor, etc.

Whatever the final cost of the burger, it is based on the socially average living conditions of the worker in each region where its parts are created; that is, the social reproduction of the slaves, the transporters, the imperial workers. When this is all said and done, the vast

majority of the "price" has been fixed. Every cent of profit beyond that represents some work someone did but which has not been allocated to them properly. The depressed "cheap" price must also factor in the social reproduction in the imperialized, colonized country

The burger would only *increase* in cost if the social reproduction costs within the core or the colony increased. This is why, also, the development of native industries in the colonized countries enters into an antagonistic contradiction with imperial industry

IN FACT, the TRUE cost of the burger, the one that is NOT set on the market, should be the cost of imperial social reproduction APPLIED TO ALL WORKERS IN THE CHAIN

Thus, the 1 cent of slave labor should be brought up to the equivalent of the 10 cents of imperial work, then the burger cost would increase ten-fold. This equation works, but *not within the same region,* and *only to describe the core/periphery*

Alternately, of course, there could be a meeting together, or a decrease in the imperial wage in order to help bring up the colonized wage; this would be maybe a 5 cent/5 cent scenario here -- but that would be on account of a general reduction in reproduction cost in the core

Is it possible for the workers to "price themselves out" of the market and increase the cost of the burger? What if the increase in pay were to give the workers a higher average reproduction cost (improved general standard of living)? Could they not destroy the market?

Yes, it is possible for the laborers to "price themselves out" - but only once they have reabsorbed every salary of every manager and financier within the system. This includes the est. $15.4 million yearly salary of the CEO, etc.

The *general increase in social reproductive costs* of the workers would be balanced out by the *specific decrease in social reproductive costs* of the owning, capitalist, class.

One of the big takeaways here should be that efficiency is NOT VALUED in the colonized regions. It's cheaper to employ slaves than to develop the colonies and thus lower the cost of the product itself through increased labor efficiency

Why is this? Because the *reduction in costs* of commodities within the colonized periphery does not keep pace with the low prices of slave or near-slave labor. Increasing the cost of social reproduction in the periphery actually reduces profits in the core.

Having done some digging, I have found an internal document from a McDonalds on reddit, apparently the raw materials of the burger cost approx. 77 cents. The average Mcdonald's power bill is $40,000/year. If it takes 10 minutes to make a burger but you can make 10 burgers

in that time, the power use per burger is around 32 cents. That gives us $1.09 so far. This leaves $2.90 from the price. The worker working at $10/hour is paid 16 cents a minute (we'll make that per hamburger using the same calculation above). Now we're up to $1.25/burger in cost

That means the unpaid value of the burger flipper's labor is $2.74/burger, which is 17 times less than the 16 cents/burger that they are paid. At that rate ($2.80/minute) they wouldn't "price themselves out" until they were paid $168 per hour.

Again, this is *above and beyond* the fact that the *entire raw material cost* is 77 cents. That means, for each burger, some miniscule fraction of that is paid to the other workers all down the line. This should highlight the wage disparity between the imperial worker (making 16

cents per burger) and, say, the colonized laborer on the pampas who is making 1 cent or less per burger produced.

Of course we have to concede here that we have flattened the entire menu to the burger, and are estimating 60 items sold per hour. Since managers have reported (on Quora and elsewhere) that their stores sell 100 sandwiches an hour on average (not inclusive of other items), the

actual value produced by the cashiers, fry cooks, etc. is higher than projected in this thread. There are generally 5 people per shift at a McDonalds, which means the productivity has to be divided amongst each of them- but the rate of exploitation is far higher on, e.g., soda

12 oz of soda, for example, costs around 5-10 cents per serving, but, due to the virtual monopoly conditions under which soda is sold (thanks to the soda cartels), McDonalds can charge $1.00 on that. This works out to an 80 or 95 cent value per worker per soda less the

maintenance of the machines, etc.

In order to accurately project the rate of exploitation on every menu item, we would have to do a price breakdown of the entire menu item by item, reckon the amount sold during a particular period, and divide the productivity by the number of employees

Fundamentally, however, even this "low margin" business has fantastic rates of exploitation. In part, it is able to do this by shifting the cost of exploitation (the lack of healthcare, the lack of access to food) to the state. But what does this mean in practice?

The state acts as a leveler here to distribute the benefits of exploitation (the general rate of profit) from the entire capitalist class. Those industries in which the rate of profit is the highest equalize and enable the exploitation of those in which the exploitation is high

The tax revenue from these industries does not get put into food stamps and other relief programs because of altruism; there are two ways this occurs: 1) the equalization of the general rate of profit by certain bourgeois elements forcing others to pay for their shortfalls and

2) the active, armed, power of the workers to wrest and wrestle concessions from the bourgeois state.

In both instances, if the power of the masses relaxes, these systems will eventually be hollowed out as the rate of profit falls, but the shortfalls of the exploiters won't

be privately made up (for example in wage increases) - at least, not voluntarily. This contradiction activates the dormant power of the masses; they wake up to class consciousness and begin to exercise that power.

But we are diverting from one of the other major points: the division between productive and unproductive labor. Returning to the $2.80/minute produced by the store wage laborer -> this is the source of every wage paid in the McDonald's corporation, including the CEOs wages.

The workers are productive laborers who turn capital (the burger, the store which is slowly degrading, etc.) into surplus value (the $2.80) by their work.

Every other worker - IT, HR, etc. - are paid from this $2.80 pool. For every five worker shift, they produce $14 in value

a minute. There are 1440 minutes in a day and McDonalds generally run 24-hours. For the sake of ease lets make it 1000 minutes and assume 440 minutes are unproductive. This leaves us with $14,000 of surplus value each day.

There are 38,000 McDonalds (more or less). Although they operate on a franchise basis, for the purpose of this analysis we are going to elide out the legal fiction that each restaurant is controlled by a petit-bourgeois businessman.

If we round to 30,000 and give the corp a

break on 8,000 restaurants and call them non-productive, we get $420,000,000/day in surplus value. That's $153,300,000,000/year. This is *all* accreted from the unpaid wages of the workers in the individual stores.

McDonalds reported $6,000,000,000 in

profits in 2019. Let's be generous and make it $10 billion. That leaves $143.3 billion; this is paid out in salaries, etc. But if we go back to the 30,000 stores and figure 3 shifts at 5 workers per shift with a reserve of 15 more, that makes 30 workers per store, or 900,000

workers.

Let's be generous and pretend the wage all over the world is set to $10/hour for the McDonalds corporation storefronts. That means 2,080 hours (full time) x 900,000 workers, a total of 1,872,000,000 hours worked compensated at $10/hour - $10,872,000,000 paid to workers

against the $143.3 not paid to the workers. That's a general rate of exploitation of 1:14 even after corporate profits are subtracted from the mass of money, meaning the upper echelons of McDonalds - HR, tech, marketing, etc., are all compensated generally at a rate 14 times

higher than the store worker. How much of the sales are attributable to those HR, tech, marketing jobs? Very few. We can attribute however much marginal increase as productive labor to those jobs. Increasing efficiency is also productive. Everything else - dealing with red tape,

etc. is all unproductive. That labor can only be supported by the work of the store-front workers. This bloat is typical of capitalist enterprises under imperialism, and this is even without accounting for the artificially low wages of the periphery.

Now of course, we're talking about mathematical laws. There are social laws that operate just as powerfully that would prevent the liquidation of excess positions and the increase of the minimum wage; this deforms the market, because the ruling class will under no circumstance

voluntarily surrender its stolen surplus value - it must be forced, by the armed and mobilized workers, who refuse to sell their labor for less.