A McDonalds hamburger costs $2.09 at the register.
McDonalds internal documents show that the raw materials (patty, bun, etc.) cost $0.34. A McDonalds employee makes $11/hr on average with a shift manager making $15/hr. Shifts are 8 people on average. That means McDonalds pays $77 + $15/hr in wages to a shift (total $92). The average McDonalds makes $2.7 million/year in sales. That is $308/hour, or roughly 147 hamburgers every hour at $2.09. Subtracting the wage of the workers ($92) and cost of materials ($49.98), this means there is $166 in surplus value accumulated every hour by the capitalist. If we take the value of the 147 hamburgers and distribute it among the workers who completed them and placed them into circulation, we get $258.02 ($308-$49.98) divided among 8 workers for $32/worker/hour as compared to their $11/hr wages.
The rate of exploitation of the McDonald’s workers is thus, when the raw materials are taken as constant capital and not variable capital, is 32:11, roughly 3:1. This means, that of each hamburger, if 34 cents is raw material and the sale price is $2.09, there is $1.75 attributable to the work of the McDonalds employees in the store. We can divide that value among the 8 workers, and we’d come up with 21 cents per hamburger created by each one. However, let’s look a little more carefully, not merely from the point of view of the McDonald’s capitalist, but from the point of view of the imperialist.
The beef patty in a McDonald’s hamburger weighs 1.6 ounces. According to the corporation, the meat is a combination of chuck ($4/lb), sirloin ($9/lb), and round ($7/lb). The prices of these meats is from the US beef markets. We can take the average of these three prices: $6.50/lb. For the amount contained in a hamburger (1.6 ounces), this comes to roughly .65 cents ($6.50/16 = .40). As you can see, this is more than the entire value of the raw materials in the McDonald’s hamburger. Even if they receive a twenty-five per-cent discount for bulk operations, that’s still 49 cents per hamburger.
One of the top countries supplying beef to McDonalds is Brazil, which shouldn’t be a surprise: the Brazilian ranching industry supplies a huge amount of worldwide beef, and grows it on land assarted from the Amazon. A Brazilian livestock handler makes 16 reals/hr, which is $3.21 USD. Brazilian beef costs a mere $1.76 and $2/lb. We can see why. The price of Brazilian beef is so much lower because the Brazilian worker’s wage is so much lower. Why is that? Imperialism.
The labor market of Brazil is artificially depressed by fascists like Bolsonaro, who are put into power by US interests to keep prices low. US monopoly capital also destroys the quality of life in imperialized countries because this is how the socially necessary labor time is determined for reproducing the labor force.
If the Brazilian beef costs 34 cents for 1.6 ounces while the reproduction cost of the Brazilian ranch hand is $3.21 an hour, then we may establish a ratio - roughly $3/hr to 30 cents or $1/hr to 10 cents. If the ranch hand made $11/hour just as the metropolitan workers do, this would be an increase of 3 and a half times, increasing the Brazilian beef cost to $1.19 for 1.6 ounces.
If we wished to maintain the price equilibrium by which the hamburger is sold at $2.09, this would require an equalization of wages between the metropolitan worker and the peripheral worker. That is to say, because the hamburger is worth $1.75 in labor ($1.75+$0.34=$2.09) from the metropolitan worker, we must equalize the $1.75 in metropolitan labor with the $0.34 in peripheral labor.
If we were to divide these into two equal parts, that is, $1.04 worth of peripheral labor crystallized in the meat and $1.04 worth of labor in the metropole for the finishing of the meat into a final product, that is a change of $0.71 in favor of the peripheral worker. For each hamburger made, the metropolitan worker is paid 3x the wage of the peripheral worker. The metropolitan worker cooking the burger on the grill, assembling the worker, dealing with angry customers, and selling the burger; the ranch hand is enduring near-slave conditions on the Brazilian plain.
The metropolitan worker is directly paid 3 times more for their labor, the hamburger’s cost is depressed for all metropolitan workers, the metropolitan capitalists (the monopoly capitalists) provide other social safety benefits to keep the class consciousness of the metropolitan workers from developing, and they also concentrate the high-waged, final finishing work for products and the management positions within the metropole. These are the wages of imperialism. Lots of quote tweets etc. demanding I account for credit, interest payments, advertising, salaries for HR and executives, franchising fees, rent, machinery, etc.
I didn’t factor in any of the standard constant capital valuations for a reason: it obscures the point, which is the law of unequal development and the imperialist forced underdevelopment of the periphery. The pay for the entire cavalcade of non-productive or marginally productive executives, HR reps, advertising, etc., etc., all comes out of the 11 hamburgers sold after the first 7. So do the salaries of the CEOs.
Rent actually isn’t a factor for a McDonalds because the corporation owns the ground. The franchisee pays the corporate office rent, but the corporate office pays no one. These costs are all marginal - as are the electricity and water costs and the degradation of the grill, etc. The grill itself costs around $3,000 but can make an untold number of hamburgers, imparting to the hamburger a mere fraction of a fraction of a cent. The typical annual mcdonalds power bill is $40,000. That works out to $4.5/hour or 3 cents per burger at the average rate of 147 burgers per hour.
The cost of upper management is mostly faux frais which can be eliminated, or non-productive labor which is parasitic, etc. There is still PLENTY of value to cover the necessary work at higher levels. And obviously there are things other than burgers made at a McDonalds - each product has a different individual rate of exploitation for the workers (for example, the soda is hugely exploitative and mostly mark-up).
Important, however, is that most of the profit is not from MARKUP (charging more than a thing is worth) but from THEFT (stealing and refusing to compensate the legitimate labor of the worker).
2087
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