Striking auto workers want a 40% pay increase–the same rate their CEOs’ pay grew

Like it or not, they've become more efficient at maximizing shareholder returns. 1978 to present included all sorts of financial shenanigans designed to turn a company from the old school "return on assets" model to a financial vehicle that profits on the spread between it's revenue stream and financing costs. I think it's shit too, but the job turned from running a company go making money appear, and the pay went with it.

Don't hate the player, hate the game (seriously, the system is screwed up horribly)

I don't follow why workers' pay should increase at the same rate as their CEOs' pay. They're subject to entirely different labor markets with accompanying risks, opportunity costs, supply, demand, cost of replacement, etc.

> Use the same framework to explain CEO pay.

Sure. It's the same framework that explains the pay of Lebron James. The NBA became a massively popular global game during the era of fast growth globalization, in which billions of consumers entered into the active global economy.

Now you've got like 50 players earning $30m or more per year in the NBA. To play a game in just the US market.

~450 active players earning around $5 billion per year in just league salary (not counting endorsements).

Now do it for global football, NFL football, Nascar, Major League Baseball, Hockey, F1, and so on.

Who knows the insane total compensation figure. $30 billion?

The economic force producing that comically massive figure, is the exact same reason Tim Cook is worth every dollar he's getting paid to operate the juggernaut that is Apple. The same goes for Nadella at Microsoft.

The top 450 NBA players earn more in salary every year than the CEOs of the S&P 500. Why shouldn't a CEO get paid extraordinarily well, as well as an NBA all-star, for operating a $10 or $20 billion market cap corporation? Obviously they should.

The only time I see arguments against high CEO pay (speaking generally), it's from people that know absolutely nothing about what a CEO does or how exceptionally difficult it is to operate a very big company.

And should mediocre CEOs that fail or otherwise perform poorly get golden parachutes? No, of course not. Exceptional CEOs should get properly exceptional pay. They deserve to earn drastically more than the average worker.

The common Redditor railing against CEO pay, looks at a Tim Cook and thinks they can maybe do what Cook does (he just sits in his chair in a big office while other people do all the work, dur dur dur), or what Nadella does, or a random S&P 500 CEO does. In reality they can barely do their own basic job, much less one ten tiers above them. The average Redditor is further away from being able to do Tim Cook's job than they are being able to do the job of Lebron James. The issue is the average person doesn't know anything about what a CEO does at all, they're entirely ignorant of it. However they can watch Lebron James play basketball and immediately understand they can't do anything like what James can do, because they get the physical visual display immediately, meanwhile they know zip about the job of a CEO at a big company. As usual the issue is extreme ignorance and mediocre education.

Why not have a law that C-suite compensation can only increase as much percentage as the lowest increase in the company?

The argument is not that CEOs are not valuable. The argument is that there's no obvious increase in their value since the 70s that might justify their relative pay increase.