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

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

#271
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but in general the CEO doesn’t really do much to the stock price. If the general market is up, it’s going up. If the market is down, it’s going down. How many companies really break that relationship in their market sector? So tldr, ceo pay is based on the economic cycle rather than how the company does.

Some public CEOs comp packages are defined by them exceeding $SPY so boards do expect more than just the economic cycle.

50% of SPY constituents are going to beat SPY. That in itself doesn't imply the CEO is a meaningful factor in company performance.

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

#272

I think they should get it and it should be in out of the money stock options. I don’t understand why so many dinosaur companies restrict equity based comp to the C suite.

Stock options are complicated. On a factory worker's salary, you probably don't have the money to throw at a financial advisor who will know how to handle those options competently.

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

#273
post #74

Settle in for a wild propaganda-filled fall season. Between UAW Strike, SWG Strike, barely avoided UPS Strike, and probably a few I'm leaving out, we're going to be inundated with half truths, misdirection, selective statistics and even the occasional outright lie. UAW opening demand isn't just a 40% pay hike - but also a four day workweek (when combined is ~70% increase in pay). Nobody expects for UAW to get everyth…

>Anyone thinking a C-Suiter clocks out at 5pm and doesn't work after hours has no experience in the C-Suite (or even upper management for the matter). There isn't really a such thing as "off hours" for these folks on average. Correspondingly, decisions made by your C-Suite can earn a company huge returns, or doom the company and all of it's employees and stake holders.

you're ignoring the contributions of people in the company that make the C-suites job possible. Why should the C-suite be entitled to this just because they work long hours?

I work long hours. I've had jobs - salaried, mind you - where I worked past 5 PM, well into the evening, and no stock options are not the same. At any rate, one of those jobs the stock options weren't worth anything anyway.

CEOs get golden parachutes and gobs of money and for what all, exactly? What do they actually contribute?

I'd love for there to be an experiment where you take a senior operations person, for instance, and put them in the CEO role, and see, if given the same support and onboarding, if they can't make good or possibly better decisions than the someone with "CEO experience"

I've met alot of CEOs, and they don't tend to be very in touch with their workforce, they simply see what they want to see, most of the time, few exceptions.

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

#274
post #246

The average CEO at a top U.S. company was paid $27.8 million in 2021, including stock awards — 399 times as much as the typical worker — according to research published by EPI. From 1978 to 2021, CEO pay grew by 1,460%, adjusted for inflation, versus just 18.1% for the typical worker. Auto workers aside, this is always a crappy stat that is thrown about. "Top US companies" is rife with survivorship bias. It's like sa…

> Well yeah, when a company is successful, compensation rises.

Only for the C-suite apparently.

> When the car company does really well, they make a ton of money, when it does poorly, they make almost nothing.

That’s already how it works. Workers took pay cuts in 2008 to keep the companies going. It worked and now the UAW is asking for the same pay recovery that the C-suite already received.

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

#275

> From 1978 to 2021, CEO pay grew by 1,460%, adjusted for inflation, versus just 18.1% for the typical worker. Why has the supply of CEOs not kept up with the demand for them? Surely, with the improvement in education and in increase in MBA programs, there must be far more CEOs today than in 1978. Why has the ratio of CEOs to Companies fallen by 14x for their wages to rise this much? /s As many argue, wages are only…

> Why has the supply of CEOs not kept up with the demand for them? Why would it?

Because the pool for a CEO hire is much smaller, than "people with MBAs" as has been floated in thread elsewhere.

If you want to hire a CEO, you either usually are looking either at A) A CEO of another company with experiences relevant the current situation, at a size similar to the current company's size. Or B) A senior exec (CFO, COO, etc ...) at the same company, or more rarely an involved board member.

These are self-limiting pools.

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

#276

> “Obviously, CEOs should be the highest-paid person in an enterprise, but then the question is exactly just how much higher than everyone else,” Josh Bivens, chief economist at EPI, told NPR. Are there any examples where this isn’t true? I know someone who works as an engineer cleaning up nuclear waste. The workers who do the job he engineers are paid more than him. He is ok with that but did pass the comment that i…

"Of course they should be paid more, cause they are."

I think NPR does a lot of damage not questioning assumptions like this. Or, often times, putting them out there themselves.

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

#277
I have to wonder. What percent of Tesla's success is attributable to not having legacy union baggage. Unions are the tech debt of the manufacturing world.

It starts with a good idea, but if you let it fester, then it quickly becomes more of a drag than a productive addition to your organization.

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

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To paint the above in starker terms: Worker pay is set by the leadership, leadership pay is set by the leadership.

Leadership is set by shareholders. There is still accountability. Public unions seem more undesirable. There we have the gov negotiating with itself with no external accountability, unlike your example.

> Leadership is set by shareholders.

Funny thing, I own a vast number of stocks through various means, either directly or via ETFs, and yet never in my life have I had an opportunity to weigh in on the salaries of anyone in the companies I hold equity in.

> Public unions seem more undesirable. There we have the gov negotiating with itself with no external accountability, unlike your example.

The government is negotiating with unions, not itself. However, if we're going to take a crack at public sector unions, let's start with the police unions.

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

#279
People get really fixated on CEO pay. Its only of symbolic importance.

Google says: 167,000 GM employees Mary Barra salary: $29M

Distribute that salary across the whole workforce: $174 per employee

They should really be talking about it in terms of inflation or profit margin. GM profit for 2022 was $21B

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

#280
post #3

40%? I sincerely wish them the best of luck and I hope they get what is their due but this is probably good news for India, Mexico and China.

US market car manufacturing isn't in India/China because of NAFTA. And because cars are big and heavy, of course.

Buick Enclave and Lincoln Nautilus are two Chinese made cars in the US. Expect US car manufacturers to have the bulk of their product lines to be made and designed in China before too long.
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