The Huffington Post recently ran a story that took aim at McDonald's for paying just 17 per cent of its revenue to employees in wages and benefits. The article, which suggested that doubling worker pay at McDonald's would add just 68 cents to the cost of a Big Mac, quickly circulated through the blogosphere, with critics framing the revenue-to-wage ratio as a clear example of corporate greed.

As it turns out, the story, written by a University of Kansas undergraduate student, was misleading since it excluded McDonald's franchise stores, which employ the vast majority of McDonald's employees. On average, fast food franchises pay about 30 to 35 per cent of revenue in labor costs.

Given the outrage prompted by the initial story, however, it is worth considering revenue-to-wage ratios in the socialist camp.

Andrés Oppenheimer reports that Cuba's Marxist-Leninist regime receives the equivalent of USD $4,080 monthly from public coffers in Brasilia for each Cuban doctor serving in Brazil's controversial Mais Medicos (More Doctors) program.

The Cuban government does not disclose how much of the revenue from its lucrative medical internationalism program goes to the doctors themselves. However, based on the testimony of Cuban doctors who have defected while working internationally the pay is estimated to average between USD $250 and $300 monthly, or about 7 per cent of the total Cuba receives from Brazil under the Mais Medicos program – a far cry from the 30 per cent share of profits that Fidel Castro proposed in his “revolutionary laws” of 1953.

While Cuban doctors serving internationally may receive only a fraction of the revenue generated by their labor, the remuneration is more than what they would receive in Cuba, where doctors often earn less than taxi drivers, who have access to foreign currency in the tourism industry.