Cutting CEO Salaries Won't Help Fast Food Workers

Rather than documenting the problem of people having a family, when their job skills only qualify them for an entry level job at McDonalds, this 2013 report by the 'National Employment Law Project' makes the case that McDonalds is the cause of the welfare payment costs to taxpayers for the McDonalds workers who don't earn enough to support their families —
    http://archive.is/o4WVX
    NELP-Super-Sizing-Public-Costs-Fast-Food-Report.pdf from 2013
    http://finance.yahoo.com/news/fast-food-chains-costing-taxpayers-173510741.html

So following this logic, if you are an employer, and you don't pay each employee enough to support his family (however large), you are being subsidized by taxpayers!

The market value of the employee's work has nothing to do with what he should be paid. Of course, this is absurd — it is just more spin that will help people rationalize their entitlement mentality and avoid their own responsibility.

The report emphasizes the compensation of the highest paid executives of seven publicly traded fast food companies, giving the figure of $52.7 million. As if that figure alone proves the employees of those companies are being exploited.

Of course, it begs this obvious question:

'How much more could employees of those companies be paid, if the corporate management were simply eliminated, and their compensation distributed among the employees?'

Anyone familiar with the basic accounting for a large company (you can look the numbers up on any financial website) knows eliminating management would not do the employees any good, but let's do the math anyway.

As of early 2014, according to their website, McDonalds had something like 1.8M employees (including at all franchisees), and the total compensation for their key executives is under $35M, but lets just use the $52.7M figure from summing the amounts from multiple companies given in the NELP report at the URL above.  So the executive compensation for all the major fast food companies could raise each worker's pay at only McDonalds by $52.7M / 1.8M = $29.28 per year.
    http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=MCD+Profile
    http://www.aboutmcdonalds.com/mcd/our_company.html
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonald's
    https://www.reference.com/business-finance/many-employees-mcdonald-s-511b2af5d945387f

But lets do the math again, using the number of restaurant workers for McDonalds shown in the 2013 NELP report: 707,850.

That would put the annual raise for just the McDonalds restaurant workers at $52.7M / 0.708M workers = $74.45 per year.

Ha!   Problem solved — eliminate those greedy fat cats!

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUf3S5NLzsk

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Of course, you would have to eliminate the management at every major fast food company, and then distribute their pay to only the restaurant workers at McDonalds to even get to a $75 per year raise, but whatever.

Cutting CEO pay sounds good to people, even though it accomplishes nothing, so it will keep being repeated over and over.