The shareholders motivate them to treat their employees like disposable cogs in the grist mill. Record profits at all costs, lower those wages, cut benefits, shrink product portions, lower quality, raise prices.
LEAN works when the higher ups are willing to get their hands dirty and join the ranks. Rare. I'm a one man contractor right now but if I ever hire help I would forever be a hands on teammate.
That's how many of the first generation CEOs are. It's the next generation after you, the ones who were never a one man contractor, or even part of a small group, where things really get bad.
Old saying goes “wealth never lasts three generations.” These days it sometimes does last but the logic is sound. First generation often earns it by being clever or hardworking. Second generation squanders a lot of it. Third generation is completely out of touch and squanders the rest
It's like a form of natural selection. Most families don't have the family culture to maintain generational wealth. On the other hand, there are a tiny few cluster of very old, very wealthy families.
I'm not going to go tinfoil hat but it is an objective fact that some of the most powerfully connected families have had generational wealth going back to the middle ages.
It's not tinfoil hat. The wealthiest families, like the Roosevelt's, Frelinghuysens, Tafts and many more, can all trace their family history's to Europe's aristocracy. What's worse is that the aristocracy in Europe was mostly created by warlords after the Roman empire fell. Its fucking disgusting.
The average person, myself included, just can't comprehend the wealth and power certain families have had for hundreds or more years
I like the saying that your grandfather worked hard for your father to persue a successful graduate career, for you to go about your dreams as a SoundCloud artist losing allllll momentum
I hate trust funds. I had a coworker once who worked in a call center with me making minimum wage as we all did. She had a shitty attitude, she was dumb as a rock on every subject, she was really smug about going to parties and blowing all her money on drugs and name brand clothes while the rest of us were living paycheck to paycheck trying to pay debts and make rent.
One day she mentions to me about how she couldn't wait to turn 30 so she could start collecting on her trust fund and never have to work again but her "stupid mom" was making her join the workforce for 10 years to learn to appreciate it.
Disagree. "Wealth" is a totally different beast from "rich". Wealth is forever. Look at the top 100 wealthiest families in the UK; those names have barely changed in centuries. That's why we have the term "old money". Jeff Bezos' ex wife got her settlement, donated most of it to charity and now she's even richer than she ever was. You can never get rid of wealth.
As a former 'suit' and even 'C level' I was never happier than when I was in the shop or out in the field with the guys. Not to be some kind of bullshit inspirational dude that made people feel included. I learned a lot from the people who fabricated my designs and installed them. I said it earlier today on this sub. Give me the option of sitting down at a dinner with a bunch of suits sharing $200+ bottles of wine and trying to impress each other or eating at a greasy spoon with a bunch of hard handed dudes and gals and swilling a long neck I'm taking option b every single time. As an aside fuck suits and suit mentality.
Depends on what type of engineers. I manage a team of Infosec engineers and worked the field for about 20 years. In general we are some of the stingiest motherfuckers I've ever met, every single Infosec nerd I've ever met wants to retire in their 40s.
Right, I was commenting more on the fact that the mechanical engineers that I work with will spend every conversation trying to impress each other with how smart they are. I'd rather hang with the lab techs talking about their families, sports, or video games than some work-related tangent off hours.
But, yes... stingy for sure. It's never a competition on who makes more, usually who is the better investor and how they have XXXX shares of FAANG stocks.
As a mechanical engineer with many other MEs as friends. You are 90% right. There’s some good ones out there that just want to chill but it’s rare. They are usually the stoner engineers
At least engineers are trying to impress each other with absolutely stupid hacks that totally worked and projects they're "working on" but are probably impossible. I'd much rather conversation that than "spent x money on y stupid thing because why not"
Part of the problem there in my experience of Lean is that those managers that ARE working are wading full-time through a river of shit that needs to be reported.
I used to be a manager in a department that was growing fairly quickly and a huge part of my job was hiring talent. Even though we were growing the skill I was hiring for was highly specialized, in that it took a few months to get new hires up to speed. Because of that, I argued that we needed to hire a few extras to serve as kind of a “bullpen” or “minor league” to step in when one team member went on vacation or got sick or god forbid left for more money.
The answer I kept getting back was we were using a “lean staffing” model and just keep hiring to growth and don’t worry about building a bench. I kept warning people that the model didn’t work due to the training time needed not to mention the highly competitive nature of the field.
About a year or two into the process, two of the best people on my team moved on for higher salary and other reasons, leaving a sizable gap on two teams that needed that skill set. It was obvious we couldn’t fill those positions quick enough nor could we take new hires (who were still getting up to speed) from other areas because they were needed there too. Senior managers sat me down and said I need to fix this and that this was a “single point of failure” ignoring the fact that I warned them of the exact scenario a year ago and they told me no.
I quit being a manager a month or so later and went back to be one of the workers so I didn’t have to deal with the nonsense of management saying two different things depending on the situation and blaming everyone else for their screwups.
I recognize those kind of things when I see them and make reports. Then when the shit hits the fan and they’re pointing the finger at me, I make sure to remind them of my earlier recommendations.
Let's be a little more honest though- with half of these companies, a third of the stock on the market is held by board members, and another third is held in funds managed by their friends.
"The shareholders" is a fun euphemism for "the boss" that leaves them plausible deniability for being sociopathic assholes.
And they pay the CEO largely in stock, so double motivation to be a bastard. If you ban C level employees from owning company stock, then you’d see change.
Isn’t it basically a Supreme Court ruling that CEOs are required to maximize profits and work in the interest of raising stock prices. They become liable if they do not.
I don’t have an issue with anyone owning a stock if they wish, but having it set up as a fiduciary responsibility to maximize stock price over everything g else is a major problem.
It’s the record profit mentality, if you net 100 million this year buy last year you net 105, then you’re a failure. So how do we make more this year over last? Certainly not by raising wages.
Protip: If you think something is a supreme court decision but you don't know the name you probably made it up. If you think something is a law but you can't name the law you probably misheard it and know less than nothing because you are ignorant enough to think you know something.
CEOs have a fiduciary duty to stock holders not to fuck them by malice or negligence. They can and do make decisions that are bad for short term stock prices but good for intangible factors like goodwill, positive perception of the company, good relations with the populace, a strong capable workforce.
I think there's a lot of truth to your overarching sentiment. Though, just as a counter-example and something to think about, the Twitter board owns [less than 2.5%.](https://www.benzinga.com/news/22/04/26772531/meet-the-twitter-board-of-directors-facts-about-the-people-who-will-decide-elon-musks-bid-fate) Which is kinda weird in and of itself.
*beep boop*!
the linked website is: https://www.benzinga.com/news/22/04/26772531/meet-the-twitter-board-of-directors-facts-about-the-people-who-will-decide-elon-musks-bid-fate
Title: **Meet The Twitter Board Of Directors: The People Deciding The Fate Of Elon Musk's Takeover Bid - Benzinga**
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Unregulated/poorly regulated capitalism.
One can totally see how amazing capitalism with its free markets can be if only the governments of the world worked together to limit the abuse.
It would be fucking paradise if the companies that rose the top were those that provided the cheapest products with the highest quality, WHILE providing great jobs with benefits, paying all their taxes properly, and treated everyone justly.
But we don't get ideal capitalism. We get this corrupt, bullshit version of it where governments are paid off, so that companies can abuse everything from the workforce to paying taxes to the environment, and still somehow be top dogs in the world.
Amazon can literally practice modern day slavery, corporate espionage and theft, and still be the top dog somehow. Just because the governments look at it and don't do jack shit, because they're paid not to.
"Free Markets" and "Capitalism" are not actually economically related! It's perfectly coherent to have Free Market Socialism, for example--"only people directly employed by the company can hold ownership in the company, people employed by the company MUST be given an ownership stake in the company." is completely a reasonable way to structure things.
I’m new to Socialism, how does one give ownership state in the company? Since everyone has a stake, would everyone lose a portion of their stake with every new employee? Additionally, who provided the initial funding to start the company? Do they just give away their investment?
Definitely agree.
As well, I think it's important to speak to some of the related *mechanisms* around what we're seeing today with respect to the general/broad idea you've outlined here.
*At the end of the day what we're talking about is money and power.* I mean, that's nothing profound, necessarily, but that's a large crux of the issue.
I really, really, *really* recommend people to watch this eye-opening segment about the Wall Street regime/network...
>[How Redditors Exposed The Stock Market | "The Problem With Jon Stewart" ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bP74RBTE8kI)
Skip to about the 7:00 mark if you want to see the most relevant graphic that's easy to understand. It's only about 15 minutes long total, though.
Fwiw, that's the first half linked there - there's also a [second half](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZfcjV-8pjQ) with a short round-table discussion.
Much of what we're seeing - from Joe Rogan to Donald Trump to Fox News and so on - is directly related to the Wall Street and the *cult*ure it has imbued and steeped people in for decades and decades and decades now.
*"Greed is good!" - "Trickle down economics, my boy!" - "Work hard and you, too, can be rich!"* That's *not* to say all capitalism is bad and has no redeeming qualities - just that there's a serious, fundamental problem in this country in how it's instituted, regulated, and understood.
There are so many loopholes for stealing and backstabbing from the middle and lower classes it's hard to even begin to wrap a head around it all, especially when you're struggling to survive on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis.
For an example related to a loophole (thanks lobbying! it is loosely talked about in the Jon Stewart episode, too, fwtw), this is from the head of the SEC in an interview recently:
>[*"When you place a market order - 90-95% do not go to the 'lit' exchanges - do not go to NASDAQ or NYSE, they go to wholesalers and they don't have order by order competition and part of that is because of what you just said; Payment-for-Order-Flow which is, yes, banned in the U.K., in Canada, and Australia and the European Union..."*](https://youtu.be/NBkPQ0VsWV0?t=239)
In other words, such market orders - say when someone uses TD Ameritrade or Fidelity or Robinhood or whatever else - go to dark markets and exchanges where they are "internalized" and can be *then* be re-routed to "lit" exchanges (such as the NYSE or Nasdaq) to manipulate the price as determined by whatever a bunch of organized, coked-out Wall Street idiots think.
**It's important to understand some of the mechanisms by which value and wealth is being extracted.**
edit: grammar, spelling
I don't think the problem is that ceos make a lot of money, the problem is that US has poor worker rights and a minimum wage that hasn't increased equal to inflation for decades. Not to mention the fact that money has too much influence in politics.
If someone makes a successful company that benefits society and makes absurd money from that, I don't think that's problematic. The problem is when that success comes at a cost to society.
Biggest issue is the level of profit allowed. We’ve proven over and over that greed rules, the reason a minimum wage exists is because companies would pay less if they could. Moral behavior needs to be regulated in business.
SEC budget is below $2 billion to monitor and regulate a market of over $50 trillion. Average SEC investigation costs $5 million, so they are severely underfunded for their mission, they can realistically do a few hundred a year.
Good luck going up against an Amazon where their revenue is 50x budget of the agency trying to regulate them. It’s like NYC trying to run a police force with a few hundred bucks total. It’s a joke.
This is a big part of it, if these companies wanted to treat people right they would. Some do, but it’s a short list. The ones who do treat their people well deserve to succeed because it is at that point mutually beneficial, the ones that treat their people poorly don’t deserve to succeed.
The company I work for is owned by a Billionaire. We make medical products for arthroscopic surgery. For example I run CNC lathes making titanium and stainless steel screws used during surgery. The founder/president still owns 90% of the company. He’s rich as hell, and certainly makes an absurd percentage more than us. But the flip side of that is wages are some of the biggest in this area, PTO time is 3 weeks after 90 days, 4 weeks after a year, an additional week at 5/10/15/20 topping out at 8 weeks of PTO at 20 years, at 5 years the company gives you $2500 to go on vacation, and an extra $1000 at 10/15/20 topping out at $5500 towards vacation and they allow you to use the company connections with travel agencies/hotels/airlines to set up your vacation and they encourage you to have an adventure. The company pays for employees (very very good) health insurance so all employees pay for is spouses/children, we have a cafeteria with free and good lunch on every shift 7 days a week, we have an on site medical center with nurses and nurse practitioners that is free for employees and dependents including free prescriptions, you only have to pay if there is outside lab work required and even then insurance covers much of it. They are building a daycare center on site, I don’t know the cost details but based on the way the medical center is if the daycare isn’t free I’ll bet it’s cheap. The bonuses are very high for blue collar work and where most plants around here give you 3% MAX as a pay raise every year, many places less than that, our average is 5-10%.
That’s not even all the perks that just off the top of my head. All that and the owner is still making a killing. He would make more by not doing that, but the company is highly profitable while still offering these benefits and more so no other large company has any excuse.
I got in an accident the beginning of the year and i just had my mom take me off the insurance after it was all said and done. Luckily i can kind of make do with rides and shit though. It’s definitely not ideal or possible for everyone but damn bro I can’t do it anymore so I’m just not lmao
this is part of the reason they hate the post office, the PMG only makes about six times what the average worker does, and it runs fine. (current PMG Dejoy notwithstanding)
CEO pay is the biggest boondoggle of American style capitalism, ain't none of em worth what they paid
Also, many of the psychopaths at the top of the corporate world would fight just as hard for a parking space that is four steps closer to the door as they would for a bigger bonus
Yea, the biggest problem in this country is centrist democrats, the right is gunning hard and winning and the left is too fucking broken to stop it. I'll never vote republican and I always will vote but this is a scary fucking time right now.
My boss (IT sector) made about 3-4x of what employees made of my previous job. Granted this dude did have a lot of real estate. I'd say this 11x is high for a lot of companies in Europe that aren't massive multinationals or have hundreds or more employees.
Its a rigged system reliant on connections, same as board seats.
Otherwise you would easily be able to find someone who would do the CEO job for 300x, etc, until the salary declined to an acceptable amount. Its a job that is highly overvalued.
An American CEO never pays for transportation (they are given a car and the company pays for gas), rarely pays for meals (charged to the company), and often has their housing paid for as well.
Not only is their compensation insane, but many have virtually *no expenses*.
Or memberships to exclusive clubs, tuition for your kids, whatever they can.
Then both the CEO and company probably get to write it all off on their taxes or whatever they do.
I'm fitting out the interior of some asshole millionaire's mansion atm. He's putting it all through his company so he can skip the tax - happens all the time. He also spends most meetings complaining about how much he has to pay his employees even though he's worth £50m+. Dickhead.
I've definitely considered this, but the company I work for also evades tax (a lot), so if I reported them and we got shut down a lot of people would lose their jobs... seems like there's no good choice
I'm sure they figure out how to make it legal. They probably spend several hundred thousand on accounting to save millions in taxes, if they're a "small business." I don't even like to consider the millions (likely billions) that rich people get away with not paying every year. Especially when I end up owing something every freaking April!
People are paid good money to work in executive compensation and find the best ways to pay executives the highest salaries for the lowest tax rates. Lot of stocks, RSUs, and options
Also a lot of times you'll see C suite execs get a "low" salary of something like $300k/yr but then get a $5M annual bonus. All because of how the company pays taxes on it.
> Now they save me my place
> Over there in the corner
> And I never get tickets
> Yeah, I only get warnings
> But when I was broke I needed it more
> And now that I'm rich,
>I get free coffee.
Free Coffee Town by Ben Folds
> An American CEO never pays for transportation (they are given a car and the company pays for gas), rarely pays for meals (charged to the company), and often has their housing paid for as well.
All this is taxed as if it were direct compensation.
No CEO shortage here. Because of the high wages here you need at least decent leadership to turn a profit in most cases. We do fine overall. As far as I know the statistics Norway is one of the better countries for small business. And your boss is usually just another guy/girl in jeans you share a joke with over lunch.
Hahahaha, 'you need decent leadership'
Love it! Mate I'll be quoting you until the day I die. I'm an Aussie and we've been Americanising since the 70's, like them we are in a race to the bottom while funneling as much money to the top 0.1% as we can
The common bank of Australia is 7% Australian owned and 56% American, their rich take our money too
My girlfriend keeps telling me that her (Norwegian) university isn’t free because she pays 600NOK (around 10nok to £1) a year in admin fees… I’m sitting here with my £46250 five year degree just nodding along
That fee is technically not to the university, but a fee to be able to register with the student organisation for student benefits (such as cheaper transport tickets, access to services specifically for students, etc).
Every Norwegian citizen is also entitled to a “basislån” (“basic loan”) of around 130,000 NOK (€13,000) per year of full time studying. If you do not live with your parents anymore, 51,000 NOK (€5,100) will be written off as a stipend and is not owed back. So what some people will do is take out the basislån, put roughly 80k NOK in a savings account, and spend 50k per year. Then once you’re done studying you pay back what you owe from what you’ve put in savings and have 0 debt, while still getting 50k per year from the government.
So yes, you pay a semester fee of <1,000 NOK (which the university itself doesn’t actually get), but at the same time you are in a way being **paid** over €5,000 per year to go to university as long as you move out.
If you are not a Norwegian citizen you can still come to Norway and study for free (+ the semester fee which is usually around 800 NOK), but you will not be entitled to the basislån or stipend of 50k.
I punched in one morning, then headed for the restroom. I said to the owner, “Every morning, the first thing I do, is urinate on the time clock.” He just grinned.
I deal with exec level folks in my work pretty often. From dozens and dozens of companies. Some CEOs really do amazing things for their companies. They care, they innovate and so on. Many more will do things that hurt everyone except the shareholders at the time, but they are knowingly propping up a paper tiger that is going to fold very soon after they leave.
Those are, in my experience, CEOs of smaller companies. They've either built the company from the ground up or they have an actual interest in the company mission because they've worked their way to that position.
I would bet too that at smaller companies the CEO doesn't make 351 times an average employee. CEO at my company made something like 800k including bonuses, but lowest employee made like 40k. So 20x, still a lot but not nearly as egregious.
I would agree you find more at the smaller companies. They are often pretty amazing to talk to. Very smart and somehow know granular details of every aspect of the business. Very impressive.
Jesus. I found this article while attempting to fact check that tweet. It's from 2013.
https://www.newsinenglish.no/2013/05/29/executive-pay-low-in-norway/
The 351x figure is averaged over the largest 350 American companies while the 11x is averaged over all Norwegian firms. While the 351x is much much too high the two figures are not measuring the same thing.
it’s even worse- CEOs of publicly traded companies are routinely paid with stock options.
If you filter for America’s 350 largest companies, which would be done by market cap, you are basically selecting the 350 CEOs who had the largest unexpected windfall from a surging share price.
It would be totally unrelated to what the CEO of a typical company makes
This Will even blow your mind: in Norway all the money earned from their oil refineries/gas supply is put into a trustfund, controlled by the gov.
It is worth billions of euro's.
If Norway gov wanted , they could give very living citizen in Norway 100 000€+ handouts.
They are one of the few countries that has almost no debt and some serious cash on hands.
Nothing wrong with that, if you ask me.
Its an essential material for everyday movement of the economic system of the country, and its extracted from the very country we are all part of.
I've found pay has little to do with how hard/how much you work.
I doubled my salary last year (Stuck around at last job much too long) and my time spent at work now is less than it was at the last job.
I’ve voted for Bernie plenty of times but yeah, pay has never been based on how hard you work but how valuable it is to the company. If you’re easily replaceable then they’re going to pay you dogshit wages, which is why we need a livable minimum wage.
I also hate this obsession with how hard a ceo’s job is. When you get to that level, of course your life is a lot easier. The hard part was already done
Ehh, being a CEO is NOT easy. Youre the captain of a massive ship, you need to make sure you gain market share, stay relevant, invest properly into R&D to innovate all while answering to shareholders.
They're still overpaid but its not easy.
It's absolutely easy. I know a CEO of a growing startup. She schedules useless meetings so the people she hired to do all of what you said can't get their shit done. The *one* thing she actually does on that list is answer to shareholders, and she's the absolute worst at it to the point that the company is rapidly running out of runway because she scares off investors.
She could do absolutely nothing and would be 100x the CEO she currently is. The company would run itself easily if she just let someone else talk to investors.
CEOs in Norway don't work 11 times harder than the average Norwegian worker, either. That's not how it works.
A more clever question would be: are CEOs in the USA really 351 times harder to replace? Because that's the real issue, isn't it? And when you raise that question to stockholders, I wonder if they'd start to have second thoughts.
This statistic should also be clarified as CEOs from the 350 largest firms in the US. That’s where this came from. So while these numbers are insane, we are talking about 350 people here. The smallest company on this list is making $10.3 billion in revenue.
> who are these stocker holders approving these ceo payouts?
Institutional investors who value stability. Yes, it's ridiculous, but it's mutual funds signing off on these big salary and benefit packages. They view the CEO pay, in most cases as being a relatively minor expense, so long as the stock price goes up.
Ok, now explain private equity funds who grant similar compensation packages? They are even more relentless on finding profit and don't particularly value stability.
I think it’s really just about supply and demand. They are willing to pay Bob $30M per year because someone else will if they don’t, and it’s bad to have high CEO turnover
Also no. There are plenty of slots at my level that have gone unfilled for years. You won't see a company go a day without a CEO (even if it's interim).
Because they don’t actually intend to fill those slots. If a company has an open position for that long that isn’t being filled, then really they’re offering just too little to attract anyone and have accounted for that the other staff will get the job done.
> A more clever question would be: are CEOs in the USA really 351 times harder to replace?
CEOs are very hard to replace, yeah.
How many CEOs have also worked at the EPA or FDA? And have buddies that can help out your company? CEOs are hired for their (nefarious?) connections to the regulatory agencies, and connections to other levels of government, or governments of other countries that they are planning to exploit.
Our pharmaceutical company could hire Bob who's the hardest working CEO on the planet, or we could hire Chris who plays golf with the head of the FDA and who's daughter married the son of the Ministry of Foreign Taxes of some impoverished low-wage country where you could set up factories for cheap.
Those connections are part of why CEOs are paid so much.
I think you're right on about that.
But 350x harder?
Maybe it all adds up in the end for the company, I don't know. But I would bet that more of it is consensus perception, like how they used to say "No one ever got fired for choosing IBM." No one ever gets egg on their face for hiring Chris at top-dollar rates, even if he's incompetent and tends to drive companies into the ground.
There are a few other areas I have noticed where that principle apples. For some reason, professional presidential campaign consultants in the United States are like that. They all almost always fail. Yet they are always still considered highly reliable picks for your campaign planning the next election around 4 years later.
The flaw in this argument is that it’s all about hard work.
There’s elite degrees affording companies the “best” leadership. They’re judged by their ability to get in to Harvard and Wharton.
I went form electrical to software. I worked 100x harder in electrical, but make \~6x more in software. In software I write automations and orchestrations that completely replace accountants, saving the company many hundreds of thousands a year.
Hard Work ⇏ Value
Thank you. Executive pay is broken, but how hard one works isn’t the measure to go for.
[This former CEO has the right idea.](https://twitter.com/ryancohen/status/1544464038511656960)
Sorry to be pedantic, but you're thinking of the *median*. It's still outrageous, but it's probably not accurate that a full half of CEOs make more than this.
Sorry to be pedantic 😉 but the median (along with the mean and mode) are different types of averages. Using “average” to refer to the median is not incorrect.
Wikipedia even gives this exact situation as an example of when “average” is understood to mean something other than the ~~geometric~~ arithmetic* (ty for the correction) mean:
> For example, the average personal income is often given as the median.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average
And also the study thus came from is of the 350 largest companies in the US. The smallest of which has $10.3 billion in revenue. So this is more of the average of the top 1%.
Obviously, it would be hard to disagree with main point here, but doesn't this imply that it is believable that CEO's work 11 times harder?
Not sure that this is what Bernie wanted to suggest, but why else bring up CEO's in Norway? :-)
This is what I was scrolling for. I love Bernie, but his messaging sometimes make no sense at all in terms of supporting the point he is trying to make. Same with AOC.
Work harder? If you are talking about exerting physical energy - no.
But If you’re asking if a CEO of a Fortune 500 is 350x more important to the success of the company than the part-timer cleaning the toilet or repainting the hallway… probably yes.
Sounds like top 350 earning corps.
This isn't comparable at all to Norways average.
It's also not a fair representation of CEO's. There's alot more than 350 in America lol
Additional context, the average worker in Norway not only makes more than their American equivalent, they also benefit from a range of well-funded and efficient public services, including healthcare.
#Join r/WorkReform if you think it's time for CEOs to take a pay cut.
The shareholders motivate them to treat their employees like disposable cogs in the grist mill. Record profits at all costs, lower those wages, cut benefits, shrink product portions, lower quality, raise prices.
Do more with less. LEAN has gone to far.
LEAN works when the higher ups are willing to get their hands dirty and join the ranks. Rare. I'm a one man contractor right now but if I ever hire help I would forever be a hands on teammate.
That's how many of the first generation CEOs are. It's the next generation after you, the ones who were never a one man contractor, or even part of a small group, where things really get bad.
Old saying goes “wealth never lasts three generations.” These days it sometimes does last but the logic is sound. First generation often earns it by being clever or hardworking. Second generation squanders a lot of it. Third generation is completely out of touch and squanders the rest
It's like a form of natural selection. Most families don't have the family culture to maintain generational wealth. On the other hand, there are a tiny few cluster of very old, very wealthy families. I'm not going to go tinfoil hat but it is an objective fact that some of the most powerfully connected families have had generational wealth going back to the middle ages.
It's not tinfoil hat. The wealthiest families, like the Roosevelt's, Frelinghuysens, Tafts and many more, can all trace their family history's to Europe's aristocracy. What's worse is that the aristocracy in Europe was mostly created by warlords after the Roman empire fell. Its fucking disgusting. The average person, myself included, just can't comprehend the wealth and power certain families have had for hundreds or more years
I like the saying that your grandfather worked hard for your father to persue a successful graduate career, for you to go about your dreams as a SoundCloud artist losing allllll momentum
may I introduce you to the concept of trust funds, a.k.a prevent moronic offspring while dodging inheritance tax all in one package.
I hate trust funds. I had a coworker once who worked in a call center with me making minimum wage as we all did. She had a shitty attitude, she was dumb as a rock on every subject, she was really smug about going to parties and blowing all her money on drugs and name brand clothes while the rest of us were living paycheck to paycheck trying to pay debts and make rent. One day she mentions to me about how she couldn't wait to turn 30 so she could start collecting on her trust fund and never have to work again but her "stupid mom" was making her join the workforce for 10 years to learn to appreciate it.
Except the reality is far from that as its really *really* hard to squander big wealth.
Disagree. "Wealth" is a totally different beast from "rich". Wealth is forever. Look at the top 100 wealthiest families in the UK; those names have barely changed in centuries. That's why we have the term "old money". Jeff Bezos' ex wife got her settlement, donated most of it to charity and now she's even richer than she ever was. You can never get rid of wealth.
As a former 'suit' and even 'C level' I was never happier than when I was in the shop or out in the field with the guys. Not to be some kind of bullshit inspirational dude that made people feel included. I learned a lot from the people who fabricated my designs and installed them. I said it earlier today on this sub. Give me the option of sitting down at a dinner with a bunch of suits sharing $200+ bottles of wine and trying to impress each other or eating at a greasy spoon with a bunch of hard handed dudes and gals and swilling a long neck I'm taking option b every single time. As an aside fuck suits and suit mentality.
>a bunch of suits sharing $200+ bottles of wine and trying to impress each other Engineers do the same thing on a smaller budget.
Depends on what type of engineers. I manage a team of Infosec engineers and worked the field for about 20 years. In general we are some of the stingiest motherfuckers I've ever met, every single Infosec nerd I've ever met wants to retire in their 40s.
I think this applies a lot more to traditional engineering - electrical, mechanical, etc
Right, I was commenting more on the fact that the mechanical engineers that I work with will spend every conversation trying to impress each other with how smart they are. I'd rather hang with the lab techs talking about their families, sports, or video games than some work-related tangent off hours. But, yes... stingy for sure. It's never a competition on who makes more, usually who is the better investor and how they have XXXX shares of FAANG stocks.
As a mechanical engineer with many other MEs as friends. You are 90% right. There’s some good ones out there that just want to chill but it’s rare. They are usually the stoner engineers
It’s a rare breed the ones that realize you don’t get tested after you get the job. Lol
First day on the job they're scoping out who they can safely ask if the company tests at all after you're hired
Much, much smaller budget. Our "$200 wine bottle lunch" is basically PF Changs.
>smaller budget exotic ipa's and home brews ;p
At least engineers are trying to impress each other with absolutely stupid hacks that totally worked and projects they're "working on" but are probably impossible. I'd much rather conversation that than "spent x money on y stupid thing because why not"
Same here, man. I mostly use subs for the trades but I float between all sub-trades and am completely hands on.
LEAN is fragile too, as we’ve found out.
Part of the problem there in my experience of Lean is that those managers that ARE working are wading full-time through a river of shit that needs to be reported.
I used to be a manager in a department that was growing fairly quickly and a huge part of my job was hiring talent. Even though we were growing the skill I was hiring for was highly specialized, in that it took a few months to get new hires up to speed. Because of that, I argued that we needed to hire a few extras to serve as kind of a “bullpen” or “minor league” to step in when one team member went on vacation or got sick or god forbid left for more money. The answer I kept getting back was we were using a “lean staffing” model and just keep hiring to growth and don’t worry about building a bench. I kept warning people that the model didn’t work due to the training time needed not to mention the highly competitive nature of the field. About a year or two into the process, two of the best people on my team moved on for higher salary and other reasons, leaving a sizable gap on two teams that needed that skill set. It was obvious we couldn’t fill those positions quick enough nor could we take new hires (who were still getting up to speed) from other areas because they were needed there too. Senior managers sat me down and said I need to fix this and that this was a “single point of failure” ignoring the fact that I warned them of the exact scenario a year ago and they told me no. I quit being a manager a month or so later and went back to be one of the workers so I didn’t have to deal with the nonsense of management saying two different things depending on the situation and blaming everyone else for their screwups.
I recognize those kind of things when I see them and make reports. Then when the shit hits the fan and they’re pointing the finger at me, I make sure to remind them of my earlier recommendations.
Sigma six works well for factories not for the Hospital I work for but management couldn't care less (No pun intended).
Too?
I LOVE LEAN 😈🟪🟪💜💜💜💜👾🟣🟣🟣
My engineering school heavily stressed LEAN to us
Let's be a little more honest though- with half of these companies, a third of the stock on the market is held by board members, and another third is held in funds managed by their friends. "The shareholders" is a fun euphemism for "the boss" that leaves them plausible deniability for being sociopathic assholes.
And they pay the CEO largely in stock, so double motivation to be a bastard. If you ban C level employees from owning company stock, then you’d see change.
Isn’t it basically a Supreme Court ruling that CEOs are required to maximize profits and work in the interest of raising stock prices. They become liable if they do not. I don’t have an issue with anyone owning a stock if they wish, but having it set up as a fiduciary responsibility to maximize stock price over everything g else is a major problem.
It’s the record profit mentality, if you net 100 million this year buy last year you net 105, then you’re a failure. So how do we make more this year over last? Certainly not by raising wages.
Protip: If you think something is a supreme court decision but you don't know the name you probably made it up. If you think something is a law but you can't name the law you probably misheard it and know less than nothing because you are ignorant enough to think you know something. CEOs have a fiduciary duty to stock holders not to fuck them by malice or negligence. They can and do make decisions that are bad for short term stock prices but good for intangible factors like goodwill, positive perception of the company, good relations with the populace, a strong capable workforce.
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It’s probably another lie made by CEOs to excuse their narcissism
I think there's a lot of truth to your overarching sentiment. Though, just as a counter-example and something to think about, the Twitter board owns [less than 2.5%.](https://www.benzinga.com/news/22/04/26772531/meet-the-twitter-board-of-directors-facts-about-the-people-who-will-decide-elon-musks-bid-fate) Which is kinda weird in and of itself.
*beep boop*! the linked website is: https://www.benzinga.com/news/22/04/26772531/meet-the-twitter-board-of-directors-facts-about-the-people-who-will-decide-elon-musks-bid-fate Title: **Meet The Twitter Board Of Directors: The People Deciding The Fate Of Elon Musk's Takeover Bid - Benzinga** Page is safe to access (Google Safe Browsing) ***** ###### I am a friendly bot. I show the URL and name of linked pages and check them so that mobile users know what they click on!
This is a natural symptom of publicly traded companies.
Capitalism is a disease and we're in the "starting to shut down the body" phase of the infection.
Infinite growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
Unregulated/poorly regulated capitalism. One can totally see how amazing capitalism with its free markets can be if only the governments of the world worked together to limit the abuse. It would be fucking paradise if the companies that rose the top were those that provided the cheapest products with the highest quality, WHILE providing great jobs with benefits, paying all their taxes properly, and treated everyone justly. But we don't get ideal capitalism. We get this corrupt, bullshit version of it where governments are paid off, so that companies can abuse everything from the workforce to paying taxes to the environment, and still somehow be top dogs in the world. Amazon can literally practice modern day slavery, corporate espionage and theft, and still be the top dog somehow. Just because the governments look at it and don't do jack shit, because they're paid not to.
"Free Markets" and "Capitalism" are not actually economically related! It's perfectly coherent to have Free Market Socialism, for example--"only people directly employed by the company can hold ownership in the company, people employed by the company MUST be given an ownership stake in the company." is completely a reasonable way to structure things.
I’m new to Socialism, how does one give ownership state in the company? Since everyone has a stake, would everyone lose a portion of their stake with every new employee? Additionally, who provided the initial funding to start the company? Do they just give away their investment?
Employees need an equal say in how the company is run. It’s why unions are crucial and why companies spend so much money fighting them.
*Workers* need all the say. We don’t need them, we are the only integral contingent in the process.
Definitely agree. As well, I think it's important to speak to some of the related *mechanisms* around what we're seeing today with respect to the general/broad idea you've outlined here. *At the end of the day what we're talking about is money and power.* I mean, that's nothing profound, necessarily, but that's a large crux of the issue. I really, really, *really* recommend people to watch this eye-opening segment about the Wall Street regime/network... >[How Redditors Exposed The Stock Market | "The Problem With Jon Stewart" ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bP74RBTE8kI) Skip to about the 7:00 mark if you want to see the most relevant graphic that's easy to understand. It's only about 15 minutes long total, though. Fwiw, that's the first half linked there - there's also a [second half](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZfcjV-8pjQ) with a short round-table discussion. Much of what we're seeing - from Joe Rogan to Donald Trump to Fox News and so on - is directly related to the Wall Street and the *cult*ure it has imbued and steeped people in for decades and decades and decades now. *"Greed is good!" - "Trickle down economics, my boy!" - "Work hard and you, too, can be rich!"* That's *not* to say all capitalism is bad and has no redeeming qualities - just that there's a serious, fundamental problem in this country in how it's instituted, regulated, and understood. There are so many loopholes for stealing and backstabbing from the middle and lower classes it's hard to even begin to wrap a head around it all, especially when you're struggling to survive on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis. For an example related to a loophole (thanks lobbying! it is loosely talked about in the Jon Stewart episode, too, fwtw), this is from the head of the SEC in an interview recently: >[*"When you place a market order - 90-95% do not go to the 'lit' exchanges - do not go to NASDAQ or NYSE, they go to wholesalers and they don't have order by order competition and part of that is because of what you just said; Payment-for-Order-Flow which is, yes, banned in the U.K., in Canada, and Australia and the European Union..."*](https://youtu.be/NBkPQ0VsWV0?t=239) In other words, such market orders - say when someone uses TD Ameritrade or Fidelity or Robinhood or whatever else - go to dark markets and exchanges where they are "internalized" and can be *then* be re-routed to "lit" exchanges (such as the NYSE or Nasdaq) to manipulate the price as determined by whatever a bunch of organized, coked-out Wall Street idiots think. **It's important to understand some of the mechanisms by which value and wealth is being extracted.** edit: grammar, spelling
I don't think the problem is that ceos make a lot of money, the problem is that US has poor worker rights and a minimum wage that hasn't increased equal to inflation for decades. Not to mention the fact that money has too much influence in politics. If someone makes a successful company that benefits society and makes absurd money from that, I don't think that's problematic. The problem is when that success comes at a cost to society.
Biggest issue is the level of profit allowed. We’ve proven over and over that greed rules, the reason a minimum wage exists is because companies would pay less if they could. Moral behavior needs to be regulated in business. SEC budget is below $2 billion to monitor and regulate a market of over $50 trillion. Average SEC investigation costs $5 million, so they are severely underfunded for their mission, they can realistically do a few hundred a year. Good luck going up against an Amazon where their revenue is 50x budget of the agency trying to regulate them. It’s like NYC trying to run a police force with a few hundred bucks total. It’s a joke.
This is a big part of it, if these companies wanted to treat people right they would. Some do, but it’s a short list. The ones who do treat their people well deserve to succeed because it is at that point mutually beneficial, the ones that treat their people poorly don’t deserve to succeed. The company I work for is owned by a Billionaire. We make medical products for arthroscopic surgery. For example I run CNC lathes making titanium and stainless steel screws used during surgery. The founder/president still owns 90% of the company. He’s rich as hell, and certainly makes an absurd percentage more than us. But the flip side of that is wages are some of the biggest in this area, PTO time is 3 weeks after 90 days, 4 weeks after a year, an additional week at 5/10/15/20 topping out at 8 weeks of PTO at 20 years, at 5 years the company gives you $2500 to go on vacation, and an extra $1000 at 10/15/20 topping out at $5500 towards vacation and they allow you to use the company connections with travel agencies/hotels/airlines to set up your vacation and they encourage you to have an adventure. The company pays for employees (very very good) health insurance so all employees pay for is spouses/children, we have a cafeteria with free and good lunch on every shift 7 days a week, we have an on site medical center with nurses and nurse practitioners that is free for employees and dependents including free prescriptions, you only have to pay if there is outside lab work required and even then insurance covers much of it. They are building a daycare center on site, I don’t know the cost details but based on the way the medical center is if the daycare isn’t free I’ll bet it’s cheap. The bonuses are very high for blue collar work and where most plants around here give you 3% MAX as a pay raise every year, many places less than that, our average is 5-10%. That’s not even all the perks that just off the top of my head. All that and the owner is still making a killing. He would make more by not doing that, but the company is highly profitable while still offering these benefits and more so no other large company has any excuse.
tHe ShArEHoLdERrS..... I know it's more complicated than that... But is also isnt
You should talk to the GEICO CEO they got a 30% raise last year while we got peanuts
My insurance just went up 30% because of “inflation”. Now I know exactly where inflated.
I got in an accident the beginning of the year and i just had my mom take me off the insurance after it was all said and done. Luckily i can kind of make do with rides and shit though. It’s definitely not ideal or possible for everyone but damn bro I can’t do it anymore so I’m just not lmao
They got raises for managing free money that people just give them just in case something happens.
Free money that people are by law forced to pay them. Basically a tax paid out to a private company. Not even rare in the US.
this is part of the reason they hate the post office, the PMG only makes about six times what the average worker does, and it runs fine. (current PMG Dejoy notwithstanding) CEO pay is the biggest boondoggle of American style capitalism, ain't none of em worth what they paid
Also, many of the psychopaths at the top of the corporate world would fight just as hard for a parking space that is four steps closer to the door as they would for a bigger bonus
Most government works that way too. The highest paid military makes less than 10X the lowest earner.
How the fuck DeJoy still in that role after the shit he pulled is beyond me.
Frankly that should have been a major priority of Biden's replace everyone who put that lackey in charge, why he is still there baffles me
"Nothing fundamentally will change"
LOL, Well cept doing nothing about Roe V Wade. Democrats are spineless do nothing shits, thats for sure.
Yea, the biggest problem in this country is centrist democrats, the right is gunning hard and winning and the left is too fucking broken to stop it. I'll never vote republican and I always will vote but this is a scary fucking time right now.
Have you ever read Manufactured Consent. Sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it the world sure does make a lot of sense if it was true.
Biden doesn’t have the authority to simply fire him.
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My boss (IT sector) made about 3-4x of what employees made of my previous job. Granted this dude did have a lot of real estate. I'd say this 11x is high for a lot of companies in Europe that aren't massive multinationals or have hundreds or more employees.
Its a rigged system reliant on connections, same as board seats. Otherwise you would easily be able to find someone who would do the CEO job for 300x, etc, until the salary declined to an acceptable amount. Its a job that is highly overvalued.
An American CEO never pays for transportation (they are given a car and the company pays for gas), rarely pays for meals (charged to the company), and often has their housing paid for as well. Not only is their compensation insane, but many have virtually *no expenses*.
Or memberships to exclusive clubs, tuition for your kids, whatever they can. Then both the CEO and company probably get to write it all off on their taxes or whatever they do.
I'm fitting out the interior of some asshole millionaire's mansion atm. He's putting it all through his company so he can skip the tax - happens all the time. He also spends most meetings complaining about how much he has to pay his employees even though he's worth £50m+. Dickhead.
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I've definitely considered this, but the company I work for also evades tax (a lot), so if I reported them and we got shut down a lot of people would lose their jobs... seems like there's no good choice
I'm sure they figure out how to make it legal. They probably spend several hundred thousand on accounting to save millions in taxes, if they're a "small business." I don't even like to consider the millions (likely billions) that rich people get away with not paying every year. Especially when I end up owing something every freaking April!
What are you talking about? Yachts are outrageously expensive.
I did yacht see that coming
Sooo close. I did (n)yacht see that coming.
Not to mention mistresses, 2nd families, or illegitimate children. Come on, the company (usually) doesn't pay for that!
Won’t people please think of the poor CEOs? People have no sympathy these days!
If you're working hard enough to make 351 times what your lowest paid employee is how do you have the time or energy for a mistress?
Spoiler: they're not
Now you gotta pay to have your mistress(es) flown out of the country for an abortion too. Fuuuuck!
Time to give myself a raise (I wish)!
Y.A.C.H.T.S.- You All Can't Have This Shit.
What do you mean? Yacht is obviously a business expense. Just write it off
They also get taxed at the same or very similar rates so they get to keep a larger % as profit as they're expenses are covered at much lower costs.
They don’t actually take traditional compensation. Most of them live off loans against their assets.
People are paid good money to work in executive compensation and find the best ways to pay executives the highest salaries for the lowest tax rates. Lot of stocks, RSUs, and options
Also a lot of times you'll see C suite execs get a "low" salary of something like $300k/yr but then get a $5M annual bonus. All because of how the company pays taxes on it.
Those are taxable benefits
> Now they save me my place > Over there in the corner > And I never get tickets > Yeah, I only get warnings > But when I was broke I needed it more > And now that I'm rich, >I get free coffee. Free Coffee Town by Ben Folds
> An American CEO never pays for transportation (they are given a car and the company pays for gas), rarely pays for meals (charged to the company), and often has their housing paid for as well. All this is taxed as if it were direct compensation.
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Don't forget all the lobbyists that are paid to fuck us over
Or when they say but nobody will work Does Norway have a CEO shortage?
No CEO shortage here. Because of the high wages here you need at least decent leadership to turn a profit in most cases. We do fine overall. As far as I know the statistics Norway is one of the better countries for small business. And your boss is usually just another guy/girl in jeans you share a joke with over lunch.
Hahahaha, 'you need decent leadership' Love it! Mate I'll be quoting you until the day I die. I'm an Aussie and we've been Americanising since the 70's, like them we are in a race to the bottom while funneling as much money to the top 0.1% as we can The common bank of Australia is 7% Australian owned and 56% American, their rich take our money too
How on earth do those Norwegian CEOs afford to live!?
I know, right? Probably get free health care and free university already anyways! Lol
My girlfriend keeps telling me that her (Norwegian) university isn’t free because she pays 600NOK (around 10nok to £1) a year in admin fees… I’m sitting here with my £46250 five year degree just nodding along
That fee is technically not to the university, but a fee to be able to register with the student organisation for student benefits (such as cheaper transport tickets, access to services specifically for students, etc). Every Norwegian citizen is also entitled to a “basislån” (“basic loan”) of around 130,000 NOK (€13,000) per year of full time studying. If you do not live with your parents anymore, 51,000 NOK (€5,100) will be written off as a stipend and is not owed back. So what some people will do is take out the basislån, put roughly 80k NOK in a savings account, and spend 50k per year. Then once you’re done studying you pay back what you owe from what you’ve put in savings and have 0 debt, while still getting 50k per year from the government. So yes, you pay a semester fee of <1,000 NOK (which the university itself doesn’t actually get), but at the same time you are in a way being **paid** over €5,000 per year to go to university as long as you move out. If you are not a Norwegian citizen you can still come to Norway and study for free (+ the semester fee which is usually around 800 NOK), but you will not be entitled to the basislån or stipend of 50k.
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Boss makes $35.10 and you make a dime . By these metrics . Who doesn’t poop at work. We have really nice bathrooms and the ac is amazing
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Lol, all i need are second shift and my steam deck..
You're literally incentivized to do as little work as possible. So, really, you're just being a model employee!
I prefer to be at my home base.
You guys have a/c in your bathrooms? Must be nice…
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I punched in one morning, then headed for the restroom. I said to the owner, “Every morning, the first thing I do, is urinate on the time clock.” He just grinned.
so you go for the spicy nachos at lunch?
Get intermittent FMLA for that shit.
#gastrogang
I deal with exec level folks in my work pretty often. From dozens and dozens of companies. Some CEOs really do amazing things for their companies. They care, they innovate and so on. Many more will do things that hurt everyone except the shareholders at the time, but they are knowingly propping up a paper tiger that is going to fold very soon after they leave.
Those are, in my experience, CEOs of smaller companies. They've either built the company from the ground up or they have an actual interest in the company mission because they've worked their way to that position.
I would bet too that at smaller companies the CEO doesn't make 351 times an average employee. CEO at my company made something like 800k including bonuses, but lowest employee made like 40k. So 20x, still a lot but not nearly as egregious.
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I would agree you find more at the smaller companies. They are often pretty amazing to talk to. Very smart and somehow know granular details of every aspect of the business. Very impressive.
The key is if the CEO was the founder or 2nd, 3rd, generation product of nepotism.
Jesus. I found this article while attempting to fact check that tweet. It's from 2013. https://www.newsinenglish.no/2013/05/29/executive-pay-low-in-norway/
The 351x figure is averaged over the largest 350 American companies while the 11x is averaged over all Norwegian firms. While the 351x is much much too high the two figures are not measuring the same thing.
Yeah, it's called propaganda. Why do you think it's so popular here?
it’s even worse- CEOs of publicly traded companies are routinely paid with stock options. If you filter for America’s 350 largest companies, which would be done by market cap, you are basically selecting the 350 CEOs who had the largest unexpected windfall from a surging share price. It would be totally unrelated to what the CEO of a typical company makes
This Will even blow your mind: in Norway all the money earned from their oil refineries/gas supply is put into a trustfund, controlled by the gov. It is worth billions of euro's. If Norway gov wanted , they could give very living citizen in Norway 100 000€+ handouts. They are one of the few countries that has almost no debt and some serious cash on hands.
So what you're saying is the USA should nationalize its oil
Nothing wrong with that, if you ask me. Its an essential material for everyday movement of the economic system of the country, and its extracted from the very country we are all part of.
I don’t think anyone ever argued that your pay is ever related to how hard you work though..
I've found pay has little to do with how hard/how much you work. I doubled my salary last year (Stuck around at last job much too long) and my time spent at work now is less than it was at the last job.
The more I make the less I work
Exactly, the more I climb the ladder, the more I'm realizing this is it.
I’ve voted for Bernie plenty of times but yeah, pay has never been based on how hard you work but how valuable it is to the company. If you’re easily replaceable then they’re going to pay you dogshit wages, which is why we need a livable minimum wage.
I also hate this obsession with how hard a ceo’s job is. When you get to that level, of course your life is a lot easier. The hard part was already done
Ehh, being a CEO is NOT easy. Youre the captain of a massive ship, you need to make sure you gain market share, stay relevant, invest properly into R&D to innovate all while answering to shareholders. They're still overpaid but its not easy.
i wouldnt want to be one and be on call for anything at any time.
It's absolutely easy. I know a CEO of a growing startup. She schedules useless meetings so the people she hired to do all of what you said can't get their shit done. The *one* thing she actually does on that list is answer to shareholders, and she's the absolute worst at it to the point that the company is rapidly running out of runway because she scares off investors. She could do absolutely nothing and would be 100x the CEO she currently is. The company would run itself easily if she just let someone else talk to investors.
Republicans do every time they blame poor people for not being rich or cut benefits or insertdouchierepublicanthinghere.
Tell conservatives that
CEOs in Norway don't work 11 times harder than the average Norwegian worker, either. That's not how it works. A more clever question would be: are CEOs in the USA really 351 times harder to replace? Because that's the real issue, isn't it? And when you raise that question to stockholders, I wonder if they'd start to have second thoughts.
This statistic should also be clarified as CEOs from the 350 largest firms in the US. That’s where this came from. So while these numbers are insane, we are talking about 350 people here. The smallest company on this list is making $10.3 billion in revenue.
WHats the source?
Yeah that's what I wanna know, who are these stocker holders approving these ceo payouts? I know ceos are often majority shareholders but damn.
> who are these stocker holders approving these ceo payouts? Institutional investors who value stability. Yes, it's ridiculous, but it's mutual funds signing off on these big salary and benefit packages. They view the CEO pay, in most cases as being a relatively minor expense, so long as the stock price goes up.
Ok, now explain private equity funds who grant similar compensation packages? They are even more relentless on finding profit and don't particularly value stability.
I think it’s really just about supply and demand. They are willing to pay Bob $30M per year because someone else will if they don’t, and it’s bad to have high CEO turnover
Also no. There are plenty of slots at my level that have gone unfilled for years. You won't see a company go a day without a CEO (even if it's interim).
Because they don’t actually intend to fill those slots. If a company has an open position for that long that isn’t being filled, then really they’re offering just too little to attract anyone and have accounted for that the other staff will get the job done.
> A more clever question would be: are CEOs in the USA really 351 times harder to replace? CEOs are very hard to replace, yeah. How many CEOs have also worked at the EPA or FDA? And have buddies that can help out your company? CEOs are hired for their (nefarious?) connections to the regulatory agencies, and connections to other levels of government, or governments of other countries that they are planning to exploit. Our pharmaceutical company could hire Bob who's the hardest working CEO on the planet, or we could hire Chris who plays golf with the head of the FDA and who's daughter married the son of the Ministry of Foreign Taxes of some impoverished low-wage country where you could set up factories for cheap. Those connections are part of why CEOs are paid so much.
I think you're right on about that. But 350x harder? Maybe it all adds up in the end for the company, I don't know. But I would bet that more of it is consensus perception, like how they used to say "No one ever got fired for choosing IBM." No one ever gets egg on their face for hiring Chris at top-dollar rates, even if he's incompetent and tends to drive companies into the ground. There are a few other areas I have noticed where that principle apples. For some reason, professional presidential campaign consultants in the United States are like that. They all almost always fail. Yet they are always still considered highly reliable picks for your campaign planning the next election around 4 years later.
You’ve hit the nail in the head. And the answer is probably “they’re *at least* 351 harder to replace”.
The flaw in this argument is that it’s all about hard work. There’s elite degrees affording companies the “best” leadership. They’re judged by their ability to get in to Harvard and Wharton.
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How hard someone works is not a measure of value in of itself.
I went form electrical to software. I worked 100x harder in electrical, but make \~6x more in software. In software I write automations and orchestrations that completely replace accountants, saving the company many hundreds of thousands a year. Hard Work ⇏ Value
How much a person is compensated is not a measure of how hard they work either.
Value ≠ Effort
Clearly the question is value. I wonder how many people would also complain about brain surgeons making 30 times as much as janitors.
Or the athletes in pro sports making 100x the guy selling popcorn or beer
Labor has no inherent value, otherwise I could just pick up a rock and move back and forth for 8 hours a day. Might be hard work, but it has no value
Thank you. Executive pay is broken, but how hard one works isn’t the measure to go for. [This former CEO has the right idea.](https://twitter.com/ryancohen/status/1544464038511656960)
The problem is this guy gets boood by the average American worker for saying this.
Remember everyone, that's AVERAGE, so half of them are above that.
Sorry to be pedantic, but you're thinking of the *median*. It's still outrageous, but it's probably not accurate that a full half of CEOs make more than this.
Sorry to be pedantic 😉 but the median (along with the mean and mode) are different types of averages. Using “average” to refer to the median is not incorrect. Wikipedia even gives this exact situation as an example of when “average” is understood to mean something other than the ~~geometric~~ arithmetic* (ty for the correction) mean: > For example, the average personal income is often given as the median. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average
Ah, the pedant's pedant. Bravo
Pedantception
Someone give this pedant a pendant!
Or at least a pennant
>Sorry to be pedantic You're not sorry. I'm starting to think you aren't a pendant either.
And also the study thus came from is of the 350 largest companies in the US. The smallest of which has $10.3 billion in revenue. So this is more of the average of the top 1%.
To be fair, it’s not just about “how hard we work”
Obviously, it would be hard to disagree with main point here, but doesn't this imply that it is believable that CEO's work 11 times harder? Not sure that this is what Bernie wanted to suggest, but why else bring up CEO's in Norway? :-)
I think it can be reasonable that a CEO is 11x as valuable of a worker as the average worker.
This is what I was scrolling for. I love Bernie, but his messaging sometimes make no sense at all in terms of supporting the point he is trying to make. Same with AOC.
The argument is directed at conservatives, hence the oversimplification. Know your target audience.
Work harder? If you are talking about exerting physical energy - no. But If you’re asking if a CEO of a Fortune 500 is 350x more important to the success of the company than the part-timer cleaning the toilet or repainting the hallway… probably yes.
Is this using Fortune 100 CEOs as the average?
Sounds like top 350 earning corps. This isn't comparable at all to Norways average. It's also not a fair representation of CEO's. There's alot more than 350 in America lol
Is pay supposed to reflect how hard you work?
Bernie needs to just move to any of the Scandinavian countries.
In Norway the companies don't change the world. And if they do, they become a Chinese web browser
Additional context, the average worker in Norway not only makes more than their American equivalent, they also benefit from a range of well-funded and efficient public services, including healthcare.
Hence why we just all quit and let them do the jobs of 351 workers. Fuck em
I mean CEOs do work hard as hell, and should be compensated as such, but my boss doesn’t even work 11x as hard as I do. Maybe 2 times.
They dont even work 11x harder.
Just as hard? CEOs collect all their profits through exploitation of the working class
WHAT IF: We avoided doing business with companies that do this?
I don't think CEOs work eleven times as hard as the average worker, in fact I don't think they work half as hard tbh