Why would the CEO need to be paid so much ?
They don’t even wear a green apron.
they would never lower themselves to be one of the plebs.
Business refuses to improve working conditions of wage slaves unless forced to.
Y’all have no understanding of CEO pay. I won’t say they’re actually worth that much, though the market does, but if these megacorp CEOs gave up every penny, it wouldn’t make the slightest difference.
Ran the publicly available numbers on American Airlines a couple of years ago. If the CEO got paid $1 a year, his salary would amount to a $.19/hr. raise for every employee.
Hell, let’s do Starbucks.
Employees (2025): 381,000
CEO salary and stock (2024): $95,800,000
Take every penny from Brian Niccol, spread it around, call it a Christmas bonus: $251.44
Better than nothing, but hardly life changing. I’d cash the check and still be pissed off. Mash that out over hourly wages, $.13/hr. I’d fucking rage were I offered that raise, and you would too.
tl;dr: We’re wasting our time enraged over CEO pay. We need to focus on raising wages, but it ain’t comin’ out the CEO budget.
tl;dr: We’re wasting our time enraged over CEO pay. We need to focus on raising wages, but it ain’t comin’ out the CEO budget.
No we’re not. Even if reducing this salary won’t immediately fix the problem of the average employee not making enough, it will address the problem of the CEO making 250x more than the average employee.
That’s barely a problem at this point. It’s a problem, but not as big as you think. There’s an even bigger problem. The reason the CEO gets paid so much is to facilitate this, and also to protect the beneficiaries here.
Starbucks currently pays roughly 60 cents a quarter in dividends, so 2.40 a year. They have 1.14 billion outstanding shares, so that makes ~2.74 billion in dividends this year. That’s 28 times the CEO’s total comp. They also spend a billion or two on stock buybacks every year last few years. Call it 1.6 average (2023 was 2+ billion, 2024 was 1.3). Roughly speaking, that’s 4.3 billion spent purely on pleasing shareholders. Use just 2 billion of that on payroll and the employees can now get a 5k annual raise, or around 2.5 dollars an hour. THAT is life changing money at the low income levels Starbucks employees have to operate at. Not “I can now buy a house” life changing, but “I can now buy groceries whenever I want” life changing.
Fuck, my numbers aren’t as bad as Starbucks’s own expectations from 2022:
Between dividends and share buybacks, the company expects to return approximately $20 billion to its shareholders in the next three years.
That’s almost SEVEN billion dollars a year, but I don’t think they reached it quite.
You beat me to it! Fighting for the billions spent on dividends and stock buybacks is how workers will reclaim the surplus they generate for the company and win meaningful raises. That said nobody deserves compensation of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars per year, so I agree with others that cutting ceo pay is an important symbolic victory, even if it’s a drop in the bucket of money flowing through the corporation.
It’s my opinion that the CEO pay is bait to draw attention away from the dividends and stock buybacks.
Fight those and the shareholders will no longer vote for exorbitant CEO salaries. Unless we’re talking about companies that do something else that’s highly unethical and need a fall guy. To me, CEOs are almost patsies. They’re the people the board can fire when the peasants start revolting, or when the company gets caught covering up a toxic chemical spill, or whatever.
Reduce their value to the shareholders, and their pay packages WILL start to go down.
You seem to think that I am approaching it as an economic problem that the CEO makes 250x more.
I am approaching it as an ethical, moral problem.
I do not care if lowering the CEOs wage will barely make a dent in the average worker’s pay. I care that it will lower the CEOs compensation to be more in line with what I view is an ethical difference in wealth.
We do not agree on the degree to which this is a problem, obviously.
Ah I thought that the problem was that employees should be getting paid more.
I’m more of the opinion that elevating the floor is more important than lowering the ceiling. Sometimes the latter needs to be done, but the former should be priority.
You’re presenting a false dichotomy. I never said that employees shouldn’t be getting paid more. There can be more than one problem.
The problem of The CEO Is Paid 250x More Than Average Employees can be fixed by paying that CEO less. By all means, that money can go to the employees. And it should. I never said otherwise.
I’m just saying that is a tiny problem compared to the much more pressing problem of “employees aren’t being paid shit”.
I don’t much care if the CEO is making 250x as much as the average employee if the average employee is getting paid well.
The time spent worrying about the CEO’s salary is time that the shareholders can spend laughing all the way to the bank, because distracting everyone using the CEO worked. Matter of fact, that’s the real job of the CEO and the reason they get paid so much. They take the heat off the people earning the real money. The fact that negative articles are being written about him instead of the board, shareholders, dividends and stock buybacks, means that he’s doing his job exactly as expected, and has, in the eyes of the shareholders, earned his paycheck. The same people making billions off the backs of Starbucks employees are the ones that have decided he’s worth this much to them.
I’m not saying it’s right, I’m saying that focus on bigger problems first, then the small ones. The CEO’s pay package will magically stop increasing every year when the shareholders aren’t happy with the results anymore (dividends and massive buybacks in this instance).
I don’t much care if the CEO is making 250x as much as the average employee if the average employee is getting paid well.
If wealth inequality continues to persist at a rate of 250+:1, the workers will never be paid well. Whatever the amount, it will not be well paid. When one person makes 250x more money, that systemic inequality is going to be part of a broken system.
We are speaking past each other. Good day.
tl;dr: We’re wasting our time enraged over CEO pay. We need to focus on raising wages, but it ain’t comin’ out the CEO budget.
i think there’s also an important symbolic gesture here. it’s not only that the CEO’s salary would make that much difference to employee pay, but it’s also that the CEO specifically (representing the company) should make sure that the workers are well taken care of. And if their wage is too low, that means they’re not well taken care of, and the CEO is not doing a good job, so they don’t deserve that pay-out. It’s not about the cost of the pay-out to the company, but about incentivizing the CEO to actually care about the workers.
It’s injustice. Plain and simple. It’s not all salary. The former CEO of my company was also drawing a ridiculously high salary for being on the board of directors for a different company. Brian Niccol famously flies to work on a private jet. Does he pay for that? Is he better than a team of people making $100k/yr? How much does he pay in taxes? He’s in charge and can’t pay a reasonable wage. Getting less than cost of living raise is actually tantamount to his employees getting a pay CUT. Is he getting more than 2%? What does his severance package look like?
People often say, well he has more risk being CEO. But does he? If they fired him, will he still be rich? If so, where’s the risk? His employees can’t eat if they get fired.
It’s not salary, but if you take Jeff Bezos net worth and divide it up amongst the 1.56M Amazon employees, they would each get just shy of $152,000 and he would still be a billionaire. But those poor people are peeing in bottles and running stop signs. He didn’t get that net worth with 2% raises.
I respectfully disagree that if they can’t afford a 2% pay raise for their employees, maybe they need to make some cuts and maybe they should start with the CEO.
Specifically, we should cut about 12" from the top end of the CEO.
French style revolution is the only solution
They were also assisted by the Irish revolutionary Gil O’Teen.
Better headline:
Workers refuse to physically hold the executives accountable.
They’re actively striking, wtf are you expecting?
homey wants some guillotine action
Reasonable, though.
Boss chooses between Paris and Barcelona while we choose between heat and power, duder shouldn’t be shocked when folks start with that Luigi talk
Don’t forget the genocide in Palestine!
The decaps should have happened then, not the paint-test.
Just saying negotiations tended to be much swifter and more satisfying to your demands when it was “me and the boys have cornered the boss in his office with a bunch of implements of destruction.”
bosses seem fine destroying Gaza.
and their ceo, not only makes millions, he works from his mansion or commutes in a private jet at the company’s expense
I think that it is also important to put pressure on the politicians, not just the business. Not only the business should take better care of the workers, but politics should too. The state/city/whatever should provide resources to the people, either by subsidized housing, free public transport, handouts, UBI, … it’s important to keep pressure also on the political front and to inform people about how much politics could do for the people.
The worker will therefore get no more for their labor than is necessary for this purpose; the price of labor, or the wage, will, in other words, be the lowest, the minimum, required for the maintenance of life.
If even that.
Yeah, that’s a problem that i have with marxism. it predicts that wages will be just as low as required to survive.
but what if they don’t? what if they go even lower?
Capitalism doesn’t require that all life be maintained, only just enough. If capitalism doesn’t need you, then your wages can absolutely go lower.
yeah, that makes sense, thanks
with all the activity of unionizing, it seems they clsoed a bunch of stores in our area, there was one near a tar’ge(tar’ge has a instore one) that is frequented by alot of patrons, mostly from convention goers. they are probably closing stores that “are problematic areas”
