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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

#341

Post by tbrownaw »

mullingitover wrote: post #278
hellojesus wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 negotia…

> 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.

None of them do the "say-on-pay" thing where stockholders get to vote on whether they're happy with the pay packages for named officers?

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

#342

Post by gus_massa »

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…

That's almost a x100 increase.

If you ignore Pelé, the top soccer player had a similar increase in the same period. https://www.expensivity.com/soccer-salary-inflation/ Compared with the median income, they went from 10x in 1979 to 1300x in 2020. Why has the supply of Messis not kept up with the demand for them?

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

#343

Post by tpmoney »

mullingitover wrote: post #278
hellojesus wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 negotia…

>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.

Really? I get shareholder meeting notices for voting on compensation packages all the time. I admit that the chances of me personally shutting down the pay package of AIG's executive team is pretty much nil, but that's also because I personally own pretty much nil in terms of voting stock, and most people like me probably either don't vote at all, or vote with the board recommendations. Still, it's always within my power to try to start a shareholder movement on this front.

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

#344

Post by TheHappyOddish »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #337
callalex wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s generally a bad deal for the worker compared to cash. An assembly line worker has absolutely zero say in the direction of the company, their work will never meaningfully move the needle on stock price, so it makes no sense to tie their income to something they have no control over.

why is it working for Tesla line workers?

The GP clearly stated it's "generally" a bad idea. This implies that sometimes it is a good idea.

Equity based payment will attract a different risk profiled group than salary will.

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

#345

Post by TuringNYC »

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…

> From 1978 to 2021, CEO pay grew by 1,460%, adjusted for inflation, versus just 18.1% for the typical worker.

We should remember that CEO pay is often equity linked, and thus can vary. Not sure if workers want large portions of pay equity linked. I remember I was once in discussion with a hedge fund for a job and they offerred a sliding scale of pay that was cash vs equity. The more equity I opted for, the greater the pay, since of course there was risk involved.

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

#346

Post by MuffinFlavored »

mortureb wrote: post #82
vadym909 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it was that easy it would’ve happened already. And software engineers jobs would have moved first due to savings and low effort and low infrastructure changes required.

40% of IT work is already outsourced and that’s a number that is rapidly growing and that’s only over a decade and a half. It doesn’t even take into account foreign employees that now just work remotely.

why does Meta pay engineers $400k when there’s somebody offshore willing to do it for $35/hr?

hmm…

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

#347

Post by TaylorAlexander »

sib wrote: post #328
astrange wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They cannot prevent you from accepting a job at another company. They can totally do that with a non-compete clause. Just not in California.

I'm pretty sure that there is no US state where a company can "prevent you from accepting a job at another company." In some states, and in some circumstances, they may be able to prevent you from accepting a job at a competitive company.

Clearly a competitive company counts as "another company".

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

#348

Post by logicchains »

brutusborn wrote: post #116
version_five wrote: post #61

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

With the complete end of the gold standard in the 1970s, the government/fed's been free to create as much USD as it wants. The benefit of newly created money goes to those who spend it first (it's essentially a wealth transfer from those who get it last to those who get it first), and it's the banking/financial system that generally gets first dibs on this newly created money. This means there's a continuous, persistent transfer of wealth from the real economy to the financial system. In theory this wouldn't happen if the fed instead created money by e.g. dropping it out of helicopters equally to everybody (or direct transfers to their bank accounts), but the whole financial industry has a vested interested in keeping the current approach.

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

#349

Post by dgacmu »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #110
waynesonfire wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they got 18.1% for it.

The effort is to close that gap. Can’t build cars without workers. Elon famously tried and failed. https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/13/elon-musk-says-humans-are-... (“Elon Musk says ‘humans are underrated,’ calls Tesla’s ‘excessive automation’ a ‘mistake’”)

Tangent: This is a mathematically muddled discussion that turns out to be about right anyway.

If profits went from $5 per year to 10, they increased by 100%, but that doesn't mean that you have room for a 100% increase in everybody's salaries.

A much better way to have this discussion would be to look at the dollar value increase in profits versus salaries.

Profits are forecast to be about $32b in 2023, up from about $19b in 2013. At about 240k total employees, and an average union pay of about $30/hr - call that about $90k year fully burdened per employee - a 40% increase would cost the company about $8.6B, or about 2/3 of the growth in profits. That may be overestimating the costs, as there are only 146k workers in the union, in which case the $5.2b increase in employee costs is... 40% of the profit growth, which seems like an entirely reasonable split of employee vs shareholder gains.

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

#350

Post by nateburke »

cj wrote: post #44
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…

IMO an equation like that would be fine as long as you made it possible for CEOs of larger companies to make more money than CEOs of small and medium sized companies. There’s a job market for C-Suite employees (whether we care to admit it or not). At a certain point you won’t get qualified candidates if you can’t reward them enough, same as engineers or any other role. The answer for how much CEOs should be paid is t…

> 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.

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