Strikes

[ousdahl]

[Mjl]

They could give all employees a $3 per hour raise.
Of course, they would go bankrupt if they did so, and the half million people they employ would be out of work.

[ousdahl]

soo I guess what yer sayin is, you’re prepared to cross the picket lines for $17 bucks an hour?

[Mjl]

Even adjusting for inflation that would have been better money than what I actually got at the age most of their hourly workers are.

And then I spent a heck of a lot of time learning a heck of a lot of stuff. So they pay me a bit more than that.

[Cascadia]

They could give all employees a $3 per hour raise.
Of course, they would go bankrupt if they did so, and the half million people they employ would be out of work.

lol, no.

Capitalist brainwashing at its finest

[ousdahl]

Mjl, glad you were able to advance.

Regarding this strike story and your comments…did you research these numbers? The average age of their wage staff, or the money adjusted for inflation, or the $3 dollar an hour raise and how it would surely bankrupt them and put half a million employees out of work?

Cuz, as cascadia apparently suggests, is it an issue of potential bankruptcy?

or is it more simply trying to make those dividends or whatever as fat as possible for the shareholder tail wagging the dog?

(Btw, spoiler alert: I dunno if this strike is about wage concessions, or actually more so about unfair labor practices)

[Mjl]

They could give all employees a $3 per hour raise.
Of course, they would go bankrupt if they did so, and the half million people they employ would be out of work.

lol, no.

Capitalist brainwashing at its finest

It's called math

[Mjl]

Mjl, glad you were able to advance.

Regarding this strike story and your comments…did you research these numbers? The average age of their wage staff, or the money adjusted for inflation, or the $3 dollar an hour raise and how it would surely bankrupt them and put half a million employees out of work?

Cuz, as cascadia apparently suggests, is it an issue of potential bankruptcy?

or is it more simply trying to make those dividends or whatever as fat as possible for the shareholder tail wagging the dog?

(Btw, spoiler alert: I dunno if this strike is about wage concessions, or actually more so about unfair labor practices)

so... What's the issue?

[Cascadia]

They could give all employees a $3 per hour raise.
Of course, they would go bankrupt if they did so, and the half million people they employ would be out of work.

lol, no.

Capitalist brainwashing at its finest

It's called math

Which you’re clearly not any good at, please show your work.

[Deleted User 863]

Kroger is a publicly traded company. You can look up their financials and do the math yourself.

[Mjl]

lol, no.

Capitalist brainwashing at its finest

It's called math

Which you’re clearly not any good at, please show your work.

$3 per hour
x 8 hour day
x 250ish workdays a year
x 500,000 employees
= 3 billion

Which would put Kroger in the red by hundreds of millions.

Ya know, unless you want them to raise prices on everything, which hurts everyone, but mostly the poor that you pretend to care about.

[zsn]

But you wouldn’t be raising the per hour pay for all the employees equally. If they only gave their bottom third of the employees that raise they would be paying each of them an extra $6k per year. It’s <$1b. Their annual revenue is about $125 b.

I guarantee that their savings resulting from dealing with employee turnover will be at least the cost of the added payroll costs. Trickle down here is more real than the pretext under which they got corporate taxes cut

If the management team cannot absorb a 0.8% operations cost increase they should be replaced post haste

[ousdahl]

Will someone who understands things like dividends better than me please explain what cut goes to the shareholders?

And yeah, there’s def a trade-off between wages and turnover.

And it’s always fun to point out things like, the ceo makes over $20 million a year, after a 45% raise since covid

[ousdahl]

There’s also the free market angle. AKA the mjl angle. AKA maybe workers just went out and learnt some stuff themselves too and got better jobs and long story short $17 bucks an hour just isn’t a competitive wage any more.

Or maybe workers just aren’t able to go back to their $17 an hour jobs cuz of things like child care.

Or maybe a critical mass of those essential workers who still had to physically come to their jobs even during a pandemic and risk their health and lives for the sake of $17 bucks an hour, simply died.

[RainbowsandUnicorns]

Sorry for the interruption but I feel the desire to express myself and say that no one on here should believe anything they are reading on this thread is factual - without doing their own research and/or discussing it with people who truly are knowledgable.
I say that being someone who knows for a fact that there are things about the company I work for that are "public information" on the internet and yet are blatantly false.

Carry on.......

[Deleted User 863]

Will someone who understands things like dividends better than me please explain what cut goes to the shareholders?

For Kroger the dividend is currently 21 cents per share quarterly.

KR shares closed yesterday at $44.79

[Mjl]

Will someone who understands things like dividends better than me please explain what cut goes to the shareholders?

For Kroger the dividend is currently 21 cents per share quarterly.

KR shares closed yesterday at $44.79

Which translates to $3 per employee. Not per hour - per quarter. So instead of paying a dividend annually, they could give each employee an extra $12 a year.

[Mjl]

Sorry for the interruption but I feel the desire to express myself and say that no one on here should believe anything they are reading on this thread is factual - without doing their own research and/or discussing it with people who truly are knowledgable.
I say that being someone who knows for a fact that there are things about the company I work for that are "public information" on the internet and yet are blatantly false.

Carry on.......

That's illegal and probably not common.

Or, it's immaterial stuff, which would basically negate your overall point.

[ousdahl]

I wonder how often it does happen.

White collar crime is prob just as common as common street crime.

Maybe the biggest difference is, white collar crime is less likely to result in cops brutalizing you about it.

[Cascadia]

Will someone who understands things like dividends better than me please explain what cut goes to the shareholders?

And yeah, there’s def a trade-off between wages and turnover.

And it’s always fun to point out things like, the ceo makes over $20 million a year, after a 45% raise since covid

Kroger paid out roughly $580,000,000 in dividends in 2021. They're forecasted to pay out $650,000,000 in 2022. Their operating cash flow increased 46% in 2021 to $6.8B.

They got plenty of money.