“average top CEO compensation was $15.6 million in 2021, up 9.8% since 2020. In 2021, the ratio of CEO-to-typical-worker compensation was 399-to-1 under the realized measure of CEO pay; that is up from 366-to-1 in 2020 and a big increase from 20-to-1 in 1965 and 59-to-1 in 1989”
The funny thing is, you can remove a CEO, and the company will still keep running. Remove workers and the company can’t function. Looks like “compensation” is going to the wrong people.
You could replace the work of most boardroom executives with a well trained AI tbh.
A board is there to make decisions in their own best interest as key stakeholders. They’re not paid for services.
Similarly, no company of any real size can survive without a CEO because their job is to work with investors and execute a single vision.
Sometimes I feel like no one on this site actually works in a corporation. Like, these roles are defined. You can just look up what these roles exist for if you don’t know.
I think it’s not so much that people can’t look up the roles, but that most people grinding away in a wage-slave role don’t have context for what is actually done at the higher level. They are too insulated from the day to day of those roles which make it easier to write them off wholesale as useless. That being said, CEO compensation across the board is not in line with any actual productivity or effectiveness metrics, let’s be real, and certainly should not be anywhere near as high in comparison to the average employee. But that’s a separate and more nuanced conversation that can’t be solved with a simple “fire all CEOs hurdur” comments that you’ll see online.
Yeah worker owned coops still have ceos. They perform a useful role as coordinative support staff. The problem isn’t that you have bosses, it’s that they aren’t accountable to you. They’re treated as face to an oligopoly, but they could instead be the head of a democracy. They also really don’t need that level of compensation
The CEO is the link between the company and the shareholders.
They get paid by the shareholders to extract as much value as they can from the company to the shareholders.
On the other hand, if the company needs more investment, the CEO is the one who has to attract that investment, too. Otherwise the company will stall or go bankrupt.
If you can’t keep your business afloat on its own, if you require injections of cash from investors to avoid bankruptcy, that business should fail. And there’s nothing wrong with a business stalling, in my view. There should be limits to growth.
I’m absolutely sick to death of hearing about “a responsibility to the shareholders”, used as it is to justify all kinds of immorality, exploitation, and predation.
A company that makes a 0$ profit and 0$ loss should be considered a successful one. Such a company would manage to pay all its costs (including wages, r&d, etc.) and function at peak efficiency.
In the US there’s a legal obligation to the shareholders, it’s not just as simple as a sick owner culture trumpeting platitudes. To fix this problem we need to address both the culture and the legal frameworks: https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2019/02/11/towards-accountable-capitalism-remaking-corporate-law-through-stakeholder-governance/
The problem is these people in the top positions don’t see anything wrong with this.
I remember telling my republican friend that companies could easily raise worker pay. He laughed said that hamburgers would cost $20. I said you don’t need to raise the price of the product, the people at the top could make less money. He then said “Oh, they are NOT going to do that.”
He laughted said that hamburgers would cost $20.
They always say this, but when you mention the Nordic countries where wages are at least twice ours and fast food is pretty much the same cost, they start ranting about how any country that properly uses socialism doesn’t count.
And they almost always end up saying something racist
properly uses socialism
You’re describing privately-held companies paying their employees well, not socialism.
No, they are describing a government that enforces and enhances labor rights and protections.
Cutting CEO pay would not affect worker pay that much.
Fortune 500 CEOs make, on average, about 17MM a year. The average Fortune 500 company has 52k employees.
If you split their entire paycheck among just the bottom 50% of employees you’re looking at like $3 per hour. That’s… okay. But now you don’t have a CEO, and this isn’t really sustainable with any sort of inflation.
If you instead raise prices one cent on whatever product or service, you almost certainly will have more money to divvy up among employees, and it’s sustainable.
Worth noting I’m for a federal cap on CEO pay but that’s more to address the runaway nature of the CEO market, and its downstream effects.
Giving everyone a $3/ hr pay bump from eating an overpaid CEO sounds like a pretty great start
But now you don’t have a CEO
Added bonus!
I think your decimal may be off. For full time work, looks like ~36 cents per hour, assuming full time. But, for many it would be even worse. For Walmart, completely eliminating the CEO pay could increase the bottom 50% earners annual income by a whopping $22.
I agree with the overall sentiment tho. More than what this article shows, I’d be interested to see the percentage and dollar amount increase in disposable income among various cohorts within the top 10 percent incomes.
But guys, just imagine what that’s going to do for us when it starts to trickle down… like any minute now…
Meanwhile, you have CEO’s doing shit like that talk that spread around this week where he shat on workers for lord knows how long.
And the ex-EA Unity CEO who decides to tank his company overnight.
Worth every cent …
Feudalism never went away, it just changed its name.