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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

#431

Post by syndicatedjelly »

hermannj314 wrote: post #101
astrange wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you underpay elected officials then 1. they just start taking bribes 2. only rich people will run in the election. This is why Singapore pays them even more than we do. Anyway, minimum wages (despite being ok policies) aren't what people are actually paid, and of course aren't especially what non-working people are paid. And remember that non-working people, namely children and the elderly, are poorer than workers…

America's GDP allocated per congressperson is like $50 billion each. Salaries wont fix bribes for someone with that much to command and even the already rich can make a lot of money getting into politics. Their salary means nothing to them.

GDP per Congressman is a new statistic

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

#432

Post by WalterBright »

ummonk wrote: post #387
WalterBright wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but in general the CEO doesn’t really do much to the stock price Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Satya Nadella, etc. > ceo pay is based on the economic cycle rather than how the company does You can always start your own corporation, name yourself CEO (all you gotta do is file some paperwork and pay an annual fee) and rake in the dough for doing nothing!!

Nobody is complaining about founder pay. The complaint is about publicly traded companies being subjected to elite capture by parasitical execs.

Satya Nadella is not a founder. But during his tenure the value of MSFT went up by 10x. I'd say he's well worth his compensation.

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

#433

Post by WalterBright »

Per_Bothner wrote: post #295
WalterBright wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but in general the CEO doesn’t really do much to the stock price Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Satya Nadella, etc. > ceo pay is based on the economic cycle rather than how the company does You can always start your own corporation, name yourself CEO (all you gotta do is file some paperwork and pay an annual fee) and rake in the dough for doing nothing!!

That is true. Elon Musk has greatly affected the stock price of the Company Formerly Known as Twitter.

Since Musk took it private, the stock price is not known.

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

#434

Post by syndicatedjelly »

chadash wrote: post #339
tysam_and wrote: post #9

There is an equation with an equilibrium: CEO's pay rate = (some multiplier) * median salaried worker's pay rate OR CEO's pay rate = (some multiplier) * minimum salaried worker's pay rate We've been conditioned to think it's not fair somehow, but the discrepancy is just....engorgingly terrible. I'm not arguing for how this metric would be enforced, only that it would be a good one to have. Especially in a time when g…

The problem with this is that the CEO of Walmart is a much more important job than the CEO of McKinsey but under this formula they would get paid a fraction of the amount, no matter how well they did for Walmart workers. The end result of this situation would probably be a mad dash to automate away any blue collar work, which may not be such a great thing. It’s a tough problem.

Who decides how important a company is to the economy?

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

#435

Post by WalterBright »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #399
WalterBright wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Supply and demand does not account for ... Yes, it does, in each scenario you presented. > We are free to change the perceived value of workers through the power of worker solidarity It's more like using the power of government to ensure the company has no alternative to the union. Company leaders have no actual power over the workers. They cannot force anyone to come to work. They cannot have you arrested. They ca…

> It's more like using the power of government to ensure the company has no alternative to the union. Unions absolutely do not need the government to exist. It is only through government attempts to control and curtail unions that the government has involved itself in unions. See for example the Taft-Hartley act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft%E2%80%93Hartley_Act

> Unions absolutely do not need the government to exist.

That's absolutely correct. But in America, the unions use the government to tilt the balance heavily in their favor.

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

#436

Post by umeshunni »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #193

Imagine a FAANG software union asking for 40% more pay for devs, to match the CEOs'.

I got an average 20% annual TC increase every year of the decade I worked at a FAANG, so 40% over 4 years would be well below average.

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

#437

Post by throw0101b »

elcritch wrote: post #73
SeanAnderson wrote: post #31

I've heard a counter-argument to this before and I'm curious to get other's take on it. Basically, the story goes that when an individual rises into a significant leadership position at a large enough company that the economic calculations become different. There's still an element of domain expertise, but, for the most part, leadership is leadership wherever you go. This implies that a leader could (potentially) mov…

Though this argument falls apart with evidence that CEOs of big firms do need to deeply understand their companies domain. It may work to a degree, but doesn’t seem to coincide with the most valuable companies. It’s why when Intel was floundering a few years back they got rid of CEO and brought on a CEO with deep engineering expertise. Tim Cook is a wizard of supply chain, and in many ways that’s a large part of Appl…

> Though this argument falls apart with evidence that CEOs of big firms do need to deeply understand their companies domain.

Counter-example: the last few CEOs of Boeing who have completely messed up the company.

They came from the Jack Welch of GE school of management, and it turns out that Welch et al were cooking the books. See also Enron and WorldCom.

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

#438

Post by acdha »

amrocha wrote: post #409
nateburke wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There’s a job market for C-Suite employees And it can sometimes be VERY illiquid. Headhunters help to provide this liquidity and get paid for it. Sometimes C-suite career people can go years without a job. Not every CEO or CFO makes fortune 500 comp and many people falsely assume low compensation volatility as e.g. a "career CFO". It can be extremely stressful, especially with family/dependents.

No. There is no financial stress in a CEOs life. The CEO that can't afford private yacht lessons for their daughter is not the same as the single mom working 2 jobs to feed her children. Stop drawing a false equivalency.

I agree but would phrase it differently: C-level stress is often self-created – gotta have a bigger mansion, longer yacht, hotter trophy wife, etc. than my frat buddies - whereas many of their employees’ stress is externally-driven - hoping the car doesn’t break and cost you a job, worrying that the cost and time of a return to office mandate will take a big chunk of what’s left of your margin after inflation, etc.

I think of that whenever I’m back in San Diego and remember the tree poisoning lawsuit where these two rich guys were feuding because the one whose mansion was in front had a tree which kept growing and the other guy thought that was depriving him of a fractional sea view. This ended with the twist that he paid his gardener to poison the tree, but was caught and … I just couldn’t get past thinking about how this guy was a millionaire, living on the cliffs over one of the world’s better ocean views, and all he could do was think that it wasn’t a degree wider.

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

#439

Post by _hcuq »

adventured wrote: post #65
econperplexed wrote: post #8

> 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…

> 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 arou…

The CEO's of the banks that went bankrupt in 2008 carried on "earning" 10´s of millions of dollars for years after they were bailed out by the government.

Is that performance related pay?

Or is it Crony Capitalism?

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

#440

Post by amrocha »

syndicatedjelly wrote: post #427
amrocha wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. There is no financial stress in a CEOs life. The CEO that can't afford private yacht lessons for their daughter is not the same as the single mom working 2 jobs to feed her children. Stop drawing a false equivalency.

Total straw man

No. Financial stress comes from not being able to meet your basic needs. Everything after that is a choice, and choices are reversible.
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