Home Depot claims they will be doing a stock buyback of $15 Billion in 2022. First of all stock buybacks were illegal until the 80s because they were considered a form of market manipulation. Which they still are, but they are legalized. They raise the total of profit per share without any actual growth by the company. Secondly is that there are two main parties who benefit from a stock buyback. Those are the shareholders and the executives in the company doing said buyback. The shareholders stock is more valuable that is simply their involvement in it. The ones whom the moral crisis lies on is the executives who also stand to gain from the stock buybacks. They not only increase the value of their shares, but the future shares they receive, and they also tend to get better incentives after doing stock buybacks. So stock buybacks can be quite the moral grey area of a company at best.
Here is where my problem lies. If you take 15 billion and divide it by the 500k employees the company has hired overall you get $30,000 which is not a great amount per person. To determine the hourly wage without other factors you would multiply 40 hours a week by 52 weeks to get 2,080 hours per year. Divide $30,000 by 2,080 hour to get $14.42 per hour. That would be how much the cost is to pay an entire workforce of 500k full time employees $14.42 an hour without the extra cost of benefits and such.
Here is where you have to then do some guesswork. There are going to be people paid more than that, but the way you counteract that is with the fact that a large portion if not most of the employees are part time and new. Due to their high turnover rate they can consistently pay many of their workers the lowest wages which will usually fall under the $14.42. Some regions will have starting wages higher as well.
Let's be generous to Home Depot and assume only 30% of their workforce is part-time. That would raise the average value then to approximately 17.51. I know at that average price point that most Home Depot workers do not make that much even if they have worked with the company for a decade.
That is why with little doubt I can say Home Depot is spending this year nearly as much to pay their workforce as they will on stock buybacks.
Of course there are other factors such as benefits that will cost the company money, but I was not sure how to calculate those so I simply went with the cost to pay their workers themselves and compared it to the stock buyback.
P.S. If there are grammatical errors I am sorry, but I am very tired and had a shitty day on top of realizing this shit. Also let me know any input that could improve or change my perspective on this issue.
This is a post I also did on WorkersStrikeBack. I just felt like I wanted to spread the word on both since nothing has really changed.