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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

#151
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…

A bad SRE team can destroy your company. Yet, even at the best places, you’re lucky if you get a small per diem when you’re on-call.

I’m not saying SREs are poorly paid, but they often are keeping entire companies afloat, and their pay is nowhere near that of the C-Suite.

If the entire SRE team quit / went on strike, there is a non-zero chance the next incident would utterly break the company.

If the entire C-Suite quit, uh… what exactly would happen? People would continue doing what they had already been doing?

Executives are overpaid. Period.

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

#152

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…

What about CEO pay * Widgets shipped?

I always think "I can clock out at 5pm" or "If I screw up it'll only cost me my job and not 1,000 people their jobs"

C levels deal with stuff I am not interested in and the while the pay is appealing the added life complexity is not. Thus I W2 while seeing my kids 90+ hours a week.

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

#153
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…

Of course they can and should be compared. They’re human beings, and I don’t care how much additional “value” you brought to the company (you know that’s BS they tell to justify being overpaid) or how many late hours you worked, in my eyes you’re not deserving to earn 1000x more money than your ordinary workers.

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

#154

> 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 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.

The most common argument I see is that the ceo pay has increased relative to the common or average employee salary. I doubt being a ceo has become that much more difficult over the same time period though.

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

#155

> 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…

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

100% this. Leadership gets to decide how insanely hooked up they will be. Same as congress. Remember when they carved themselves out their own Health Insurance requirements? Same thing.

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

#156

Next year’s headline: Auto Makers Hike Prices 40%, Leaving Buyers Stranded

They can't do that, because there are plenty of other car makers including from Japan, Germany, etc. This is why competition is good.

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

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wi…

Any idea why this change occurred? I know it’s probably multifaceted, but my first thought was that increasing inflation since the 70s has meant that there is an incentive to have as much debt as possible, the hope being that it will be inflated away

The Friedman doctrine[1] + hyperstition[2].

1. Friedman, Milton. "The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits." The New York Times, 13 September 1970, https://web.archive.org/web/20230913104415/https://www.nytim...

2. Carstens, Delphi. "HYPERSTITION." Xenopraxis, n.d., http://xenopraxis.net/readings/carstens_hyperstition.pdf.

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

#158

> 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…

Stellantis has 270,000+ employees across 16 brands. I'm not saying their CEO does or doesn't deserve $20m in compensation but at some point you're going to run into a problem where... nobody wants to do that job for $1m/yr and they wouldn't be qualified or very good at it.

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

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tariffs, which are just a regressive tax increase on car consumers, are a very bad industrial policy. You want to do export promotion instead.

> You want to do export promotion instead. That's what us Germans did, and look where it brought us to: our car companies make a significant chunk of their profit in China - Deka estimates the Chinese share of BMW profits at ~40% [1], for VW all I could find is that 41% of their exports go to China, for Mercedes it's 37%. Now the Chinese government is massively subsidizing domestic electric vehicles, and our car comp…

Sounds like they made a lot of money they wouldn't have otherwise. If they're not making that in the future, that's still better than the alternative.

You could always sell to the rest of Europe, but since they're in a fiscal union with you and you refuse to deficit spend, they're not very good customers.

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

#160
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SREs aren't on the board of directors setting the pay for other SREs who are on their board of directors though. The elite/ownership/"capitalism winner" class are playing on an entirely different level with their power and influence. Don't kid yourself into drawing comparisons with your situation and miniscule in comparison compensation. It's always heads they win, tails you lose.

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The people who decide where money gets allocated are allocating most of it to themselves? If this was done in a government it would be called extreme corruption.
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