Actually, in some of the most egregious examples (Walmart), management and/or owners are paid enough to make a real difference in what workers are paid. The six Walton heirs hold as much money as the entire bottom 42% of Americans combined. A pay raise of $2/hour for every non-management Walmart worker (raising hundreds of thousands of people out of poverty), and/or giving them reasonable benefits, would not change that statistic in dramatic fashion.
According to the wikipedia 2013 stats, WMT has 2.2 million employees and and Walmart family owns "over 50%" of Walmart (let's assume 50%). 2014 net was 16 billion but 6 billion was paid in dividends to shareholders. Assuming a 2000 hour work-year, if ALL of the non-dividend was spent on wage increases, that's a $2.27 extra per hour all 2.2 million employees could get.
Well, boards often approve costly "incentive plans" for employees, but would a board approve 10 billion dollars to be distributed to employees every year? What would that mean for the future stock price?
Keep also in mid the other 50% ownership - probably pension plans funds.
You also mention already accrued wealth in form of stock, not income originally. How would distributing that work exactly? Would you add some kind of extraordinary tax on every WMT stakeholder? Their dividend alone (6 billion) is not enough to cover the wage increase.
It would also mean that all of the employees have a lot more money to spend, a part of which they'd spend at Walmart. Wasn't it Ford who back in the early 1900 gave his employees a lot higher wages than other companies so they could spend more and thus raise his own profits?
That's a nice example! I always thought that it didn't make economic sense to pay people more money just so they could buy stuff from you. But just now I realized that it's actually possible.
Let's say you're selling cars for 100 dollars, and make 10 dollars in profit from each car sold. There's a lot of folks who have only 99 dollars and can't afford a car. If you give such a person one dollar, they will buy your car and you'll be 9 dollars richer.
Now, of course that's just a market segmentation scheme in disguise. If you could identify the folks who have 99 dollars and give them a 1 dollar discount instead, you'd profit even more, because they wouldn't be able to spend it on anything except buying a car from you. That's how companies do it today, they use employee discounts to get all the benefit of raised wages without actually raising wages.
That's an incorrect assumption, possibly wildly so. Likely, more than half of Walmart employees are part-time and temporary employees, partly to avoid giving them legally required employee benefits.
Also, I appreciate that you've done the math in more detail than I did. I did a quick calculation in my head based on the 2 million employees to come up with $2, but you've been more precise and provided numbers, and I appreciate it. Even though we disagree on what the starting numbers for the calculation should be. Basing the discussion in reality is nice, and what I like about HN.
You don't have to single out Wal-Mart specifically. Just put in sensible inheritance taxes, raise the marginal tax rates on high-income brackets across the board, and raise the capital gains rate.
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2012/09/sam-waltons-fortune-...
It's not enough to explain it, but it is a relevant piece of the puzzle.