[brianwawok]

Well, the average McDonald's makes something like 40k profit per employee year, and Apple makes something like a million bucks per employee year... So the salary of the two tends to reflect that.

(Numbers made up but I bet they Aren't that far off)

That is what productivity means here. Not how hard or socially useful the product is. If we all have service jobs, we all would make the same pay. Productivity is why software developer can make good pay.

[user5994461]

$1.8M per employee for Apple

http://uk.businessinsider.com/top-tech-companies-revenue-per...

[lultimouomo]

That's revenue. While Apple is hugely profitable, I'm pretty sure it has great manufacturing costs and per-employee profits are a fraction of that (the first google result says $0.4M).

[foota]

Profit includes employee cost though. It seems those should be excluded.

[luckydata]

Depends if you're calculating gross or net.

[Spooky23]

That's a pretty useless comparison between sectors, as you're excluding the manufacturing workforce for Apple, but only partially excluding McDonalds (most workers are franchisee employees).

[brianwawok]

Or look at a waitress in a restaurant. The math will be similar. A service job can't pay you a 6 fig salary outside of a few niche roles. That is why the "it's ok, we can all get service jobs" is a lie. That's a pretty crappy life.

[woah]

Way off topic from the original article but "we can all get service jobs" implies a reality where the cost of any manufactured good and food is approaching 0. In that reality, you would only ever need to spend the money from your service job in other services.