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The amount of profits piled up by corporations dwarfs all reason, but the amount of money executives and speculators haul in at our expenses comes into stronger focus when we examine a different metric: Revenue per employee.

The 10 corporations that have the highest revenue per employee averaged US$5.8 million per employee. Each of these top 10, incidentally, is either a pharmaceutical or an oil and gas company. Topping the list is Phillips 66, which managed to haul in $11.5 million per employee. One suspects that the average employee sees no more than a minuscule fraction of that figure.

Examining the 100 largest corporations in the world by revenue, Expert Market, a business consultancy, ranked them by revenue per employee to see which were the most “efficient.” (It is quite possible that other, smaller corporations extract more revenue per employee.) The other oil and gas companies among the top 10 were PTT, Valero Energy, Exxon Mobil, Royal Dutch Shell, BP and Statoil.

Interestingly, two of these companies are government enterprises: PTT is majority-owned by the government of Thailand and Statoil is two-thirds owned by the government of Norway. So much for the idea that governments should never own enterprises; at least the profits from these companies can be used for public good. The public ought to own all energy companies considering the gigantic subsidies they receive — an estimated US$5.6 trillion per year, when environmental and health costs are added to the subsidies, foregone taxes and other expensive goodies handed out by governments.

The pharmaceutical companies among the top 10 are Amerisourcebergen Corp., Express Scrips Holding Co. and McKesson Corp. Amerisourcebergen and McKesson both distribute pharmaceuticals, and Express Scrips administers prescription drug benefits for tens of millions of health plan members. Each of these primarily operates in the United States, the only advanced-capitalist country without universal health coverage, and two also operate in Canada, where corporate pressure on the public health system is strong, in part due to its proximity to the U.S.

The pharmaceutical industry is immensely profitable in the U.S., and the industry’s layer of distribution and administration adds to the overall cost. Health care in the U.S. is designed to deliver corporate profits rather than health care, and these kinds of huge profits explain why health care costs in the U.S. are vastly higher than any other countrywhile delivering mediocre results.

Technology companies squeeze somewhat less out of their employees. Apple ranks as the technology company with the most revenue per employee, at about $1.9 million. Google ranks second at $1.2 million. But how much profit does a company need to make? Apple’s products are produced through sweatshop labor outside the U.S., mostly in China, through an army of subcontractors that dwarf the size of Apple’s direct employees.

U.S. President Barack Obama once asked Apple’s chief executive officer, Steve Jobs, what it would take to bring those jobs back to the U.S., and Jobs replied, “They aren’t coming back.” Apple claims it can’t afford to pay higher wages. Yet Apple is sitting on an immense pile of money — $206 billion according to its own quarterly financial report.

Research by the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change in Manchester, in 2012, found that the cost of manufacturing a 4G iPhone in China is $178 while the phone sells for $640 — a profit margin of 72 percent. The Centre calculated that if it were made in the U.S. by employees making $21 an hour, the production cost would be $337, a still robust profit margin of 46 percent.

At the end of the day, corporate executives and financiers expect those revenues to be converted into profits, and the higher the revenue that can squeezed out of each employees, the higher the profit is likely to be. From 1995 to 2005, profits per employee at the 30 largest companies by market capitalization (that is, the highest valuations set by stock markets) more than doubled, according to the business consultant McKinney & Company.

A more recent list, prepared by Bloomberg, shows 25 corporations with profits per employee higher than $400,000. Oil and gas companies are well represented here, with 10 making the list, including Exxon Mobil. Four biotechnology companies made the list, as did Apple with $573,000 net income per employee.

So if more is squeezed out of us, then there is less we are able to buy. Thus the “recovery” often blathered about in the corporate media is a recovery for the one percent. Of the eight recessions since 1960, consumer spending has increased less from the bottom of the recession than in any of the previous ones after the same period of time. If you don’t have it, you aren’t buying it, especially since so many people are trying to reduce their debt.

The flip side of this is that the massive profits corporations are raking in by not paying their employees, and squeezing more out of those who do have a job, is that record amounts are spent on buying back their stock, paying out higher dividends, on mergers-and-acquisitions or on bloated executive salaries. The corporations comprising the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index are on course to spend nearly $1 trillion on stock buybacks and dividends in 2015, or nearly equal to their total operating earnings for the year.

Cut back, cut back is the mantra. But have you noticed its always working peoples’ turn to cut back?