Well if it were a single person who got paid more under MW increases I might agree with you, but it's not just a few employees making an extra few bucks an hour, it's like 80% of their staff who gets a few bucks more an hour.
Rough example, a single McD has roughly 40 employees and figure 5 of them already make more than $15/h (shift & store manager(s), etc.), so you're talking about going from an annual wage expense of $15,080 per employee to $31,200 - that's an increase of $564,200 a year for the raw paid wage alone. Then you have to add in the various rate based "fees" employees also have to pay $35k a year more in Social Security Taxes (rate is 6.2% of employee's gross pay), $8k a year more in Medicare taxes (1.45% of employee's gross pay), then there's like roughly $34-64k more for FUTA and SUTA taxes, which are funky and vary state to state so I'm not going to get into the "true" math for them (FUTA is basically a flat rate of 6% of each employee's first $7k of wages, minus 0.6% of your SUTA taxes, unless the state itself is borrowing too much, in which case you only get to subtract 0.3% of your state unemployment taxes from your FUTA tax obligation. SUTA rates cannot be lower than 6% of the first $7k per employee, but they can apply to each employee's wages up to, I believe, $41k is the highest I've seen.) In any event, the increased cost to your average McD of a MW increase from $7.25/h to $15/h would be roughly $640k to $670k per year. There are roughly 34.5k McD's in the USA so you're talking about an increase of $22b a year.
Of course, that doesn't have anything to do with McD's corporate net profits /nor/ would it come out of the CEO's pay, because McD's are franchises; corp makes, I believe, 12% or 15% of each stores gross profits - but of course you that right? You just want to toss around big meaningless numbers like they matter because it makes you looks like you might know what your talking about yea?
In reality that MW increase comes straight out of each individual store owner and make nowhere near $5b in net profits a year - in fact even the best of these folks would be lucky to show $1m a year profits - and a MW increase will take from $640-670k a year, that's over half of their profits for their store; which basically means even a minor downturn in the local economy will put them under and there will be no job at all.
As far as CEO's wages go, it's not at all hard to understand why they make so much if one has any iota of comprehension of the actual job itself - something people who ***** about CEO pay don't get, they basically claim they're just "glorified managers" and think that anyone could do their job, but the truth is most of these whiners can barely even handle getting their asses out of bed and into work on time on any consistent basis.
CEO's who can handle a multi-billion dollar corporations, or multi-nationals, don't grow on trees. It requires a very specific blend of skills and personality, some of which cannot be learned and one must be "born with it," thus it is a highly competitive field. Globally there might be say 2 million people in total who can competently handle the job at all, and if one wants someone with a proven track record and good background in the field then you're down to say 50k total on the entire planet. The competition for this small selection of people is extremely high, unlike a MW worker who can literally be replaced by damn near anyone off the street, or often, if humans weren't so "racist" against animals, trained monkeys...
It always makes me laugh when the disgruntled underlings ***** about my extra few bucks an hour in management positions, so I'll offer to give em a chance and chuck a little extra responsibility in their laps; then I get to watch them buckle under the "added strain" of having to do something so simple and easy as say handling a single stores inventory; a very minor task that is barely even rung two on the ladder. Then they either quit in shame or admit that they actually can't handle it, don't deserve more, and quit bitching.
Unlike MW whiners, I realize that, despite my high opinion of myself, and even my management "prowess," even the worst CEO could probably make me buckle without even trying... That's a lot of why I can get jobs though, see I'm not entitled; I know what I'm actually worth to a business and I understand the average pay rates of my "peers" who compete against me for the same jobs, thus I am able to properly gauge, and undercut slightly, what to "ask for" and get almost any open job I want.
MW workers are always going to be practically worthless to the overall operation of any given store - not so much that they don't work, I know they do, but because they are so easily replaced by anyone else. In the grand scheme, an employee's "worth" to their employer is what dictates their wage, this is based on how badly said employer wants to /retain/ said employee. When MW employee A can be replaced by practically anyone looking for a job, they are not going to move up or get a raise. If someone wants a raise, then they need to make themselves indispensable to their employer, they need to actually /prove/ to their employer that they are worth retaining. This requires /extra/ effort above and beyond doing the minimum of their job requirements, it means caring about the profit margin of the business itself, it means supporting management decisions - including understanding /why/ managers sometimes get raises over the other employees (retention again), it means actually dedicating yourself to the job, rather than just doing it to pay your personal bills.
That is just /one/ of the most basic, simplest, and easiest differences in "think" process that separates a perpetual MW'er from an employee who is able to rise above MW. ANYONE can easily rise above MW, they just have to learn humility and be dedicated to their job. It's not hard at all, and yet, these dipshits can't even manage that simple a task, oh but they'll run around yapping their faces off about how much more their boss makes than them, and how /they/ are "worth more," "a better employee," "smarter than," etc. It's hilarious when you look at it from a broader perspective, because if these folks put in half as much of the effort they put into bitching about their pay rate, into showing their boss their "worth" to the business, they wouldn't be making MW anymore.