How much value do you think the typical McDonald's employee adds to the business? Clearly MCD is quite profitable. What would happen if MCD employees on the front lines nationwide managed to unionize and then started a strike? Would this considerably disrupt MCD's ability to turn a profit? If demanded before they would return to work, could MCD pay these employees a higher wage and still make a profit? If so, I think we have to agree that this class of employees isn't being paid a wage commensurate with the value the class adds.
Eh? So you're basically arguing that labor wages should theoretically rise enough to eat almost all of retained earnings? As long as the company has a number > $0, they're good?
I'm not arguing that, mostly out of selfishness since I'm both an employee and investor and there are plenty of reasons that I want to see companies turning profits. The largest being that I can diversify my income among many companies by owning lots of them, rather than having my income tied only to what would be the profits of the company I work for. This is good for everybody investing. Of course, I'm also not part of the 80% of the households in this country that only hold a combined 15% of its wealth, so I could be accused of being biased in thinking corporate profits are great.
If I wanted to look at it strictly from a laborer's standpoint, particularly a minimum wage laborer, it's an easy argument. For laborers that are not also investors, I'm having trouble seeing why the laborer wouldn't want wages to consume the entire profit. They could disagree on how much of the gross revenue should be reinvested into the business, which would then compete with wages rather than profits, sure, but profits don't seem to help them.
In fact, I could probably make that argument from a stronger vantage than minimum wage laborer. Companies turning profits don't appear to appreciably benefit the majority of US households. Median US net worth excluding home equity (so max worth that could be invested) is about $30k. All investable wealth returning 10% represents less income than a $1.45/hr raise for one full time worker in half of US households. Since that's of little help, it seems to me that the majority of this country should be demanding more income at the expense of the ~$1.5T in corporate profits per quarter. I'd bet most of them would be much better off if all of those profits were distributed as wages instead.
Labor isn't the only expense for a business.
I don't really see your point in stating this. Labor isn't the only expense, of course, which is why I mentioned profit and not gross revenue. Since profit is by definition exclusive of expenses, nothing considered profit is being spent towards labor or non-labor expenses for a business.
Just because they earn a profit doesn't mean they're underpaying their labor.
If you define the value of labor by what you can get away paying labor, well, you tautologically cannot underpay labor, can you? If you define the value of labor as the economic value the employee adds to a company, you can't overpay labor without taking a loss. In fact, because of the other expenses you mention, you are forced to underpay the full economic value the employee adds in order to keep a company afloat. This is accepted for myriad reasons, including job stability at a company and not having to handle overhead on your own. So I don't get your statement here, either. You either cannot or must underpay the value of labor, depending on definition, and profit has nothing to do with it.
If you read the rest of my post you excerpted from, you'll see I think we can set a minimum wage in a manner to minimize the cost to the social safety net, regardless of company profits. That may mean raising the minimum wage and putting a small number of people out of a job so a large number of people are less dependent on it. It may mean lowering the minimum wage so a large number of people are newly employable at a small cost to the safety net and a small number are more dependent on the safety net. I don't know where that balance is, though I'd guess the former. Regardless, I'm willing to bet it's far below companies no longer make profits and far above no minimum wage.