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Yes it does. Aetna employees almost 50,000 people. Aetna owes some success to their CEO. They owe most of their success to their employees.
And if the company had done poorly, would be game for the employees taking a pay cut? It works both ways.
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A CEO is responsible for the products that they make. In the case of any company really you have to deal with various professionals, the City, and laborers to make a product. I think it's fair to say that no single laborer, it seems, is as important in the process of production than the person making all the decisions to employ labor to some final product.
But the CEO doesn't make all the decisions. Like I said, the comparison doesn't really work. Aetna isn't one CEO and 50,000 labourers, it has an entire corporate chain of command.
Hell even at the very top the Commander in Chief doesn't make "all the decision".
Paywall bypass: https://m.facebook.com/flx/warn/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com...
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$450m would work out to $900 per employee (assuming 50k employees), not bad for a bonus. edit: As commenters below pointed out correct number is $9,000 per employee, which would have made for a pretty awesome Christmas bonus. If we also include CVS employees (240k) the bonus drops to $1,552 which is still pretty good.
CVS alone had over 240k employee in 2016. [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CVS_Pharmacy
I don't mean to suggest this is a significant issue on it's own, but high level executive compensation really does add up to a significant cost at large corporations. And really, this is just stock compensation he received other pay and benefits.
Whatever your politics that $500 million comes from profit in healthcare. Aetna has an economic incentive to denvy as much care as they can. That $500 million to one person is part of the overall cost of healthcare in the U.S. Is this really money well spent on healthcare?
More importantly, that 500M was money siphoned away from healing people. This is a share of the reward in not healing the sick.
Oligarchy at its best: Aetna/CVS workers mostly making minimum wage and doing all the work while the CEOs earning insane paychecks. Would this guy really be worse off if he only made 50M and the other 450M would go to the employees?
would you accept $50 bonus and $1 to each of your 450 covorkers if you were set to receive $500 bonus instead?
$450 to most of the population is a meaningful amount that could help pay rent/mortgate, buy food, pay for daycare, etc. $450,000,000 to someone who already has $50,000,000 just means stepping up to a megayacht.
Perhaps a more apt analogy would be the following:
Would you be happy if you Product Manager at work got a bonus of 10,000 times your salary for managing a wildly successful and profitable project to completion when you and your coworkers did most of the grunt work?
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Do you really think the employees making minimum wage are doing "all the work?" If that's true, this guy did literally nothing. Which I doubt. Anyway, it seems like he's done a decent job of trying to spread the wealth around (no idea if the claims are true, of course). FTA: "He is one of the highest-profile leaders in managed care, known partly for sharing his personal health-care experiences after a severe ski acci…
At least he is not one of the right wing nutjobs like the guy who built the creationist museum.
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Something I find curious is the degree to which HN seems to want to break out the torches and pitchforks when a CEO profits handsomely by increasing shareholder value. There doesn't seem to be the same animus towards ordinary developers becoming millionaires in a few short years by getting lucky and landing at the right unicorn startup pre-IPO. CEOs interests are aligned perfectly in this situation: increase sharehol…
I'm not particularly animated by the issue but I'm also not convinced the compensation has much to do with relative ability and performance. It's based on lucky positioning and risk averse ass covering (the board thinks it is more defensible to pay lots for a star than take a risk paying less).
If only you owned stock in CVS or Aetna you'd be able to make your voice heard.
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I didn't read the budget, and likely you didn't read it too. We can't do all things at the same time, so we have experts to take care of things. (Say, you get a CT scan, you are not going to view it and interpret it, your radiologist will.) The same with the budget: I trust the president and the Republicans, as I take their word for it.
"I trust the president and the Republicans, as I take their word for it." That's a bad strategy for a citizen in a democracy. If you blindly believe a party or politician you can't make educated choices.
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I'm not particularly animated by the issue but I'm also not convinced the compensation has much to do with relative ability and performance. It's based on lucky positioning and risk averse ass covering (the board thinks it is more defensible to pay lots for a star than take a risk paying less).
Who gets to decide this? As I understand it, it's the board of directors that put together a compensation committee. It's not like they are spending your money. They're spending the shareholder's money. If only you owned stock in CVS or Aetna you'd be able to make your voice heard.
You think I should keep my opinion to myself or something?