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Top 20 CEO pay in the S&P 500 is disgusting
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this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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Work Reform
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A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.
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- All workers must be paid a living wage for their labor.
- Income inequality is the main cause of lower living standards.
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- Higher wages for underpaid workers.
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Executives of large companies should always be paid wholly or mostly in stock and not allowed to hedge. This is the only way to be aligned with any 1%er that I can think of, when their interests and those of the common shareholder are unified.
No, they should be paid wages like everybody else, and also hired and fired like everybody else. The idea that a CEO is some kind of special superstar with talents nobody else have is ridiculous. The current situation is a scheme to help keep the 1% in the 1%.
Threy are paid wages like everybody else. And a CEO of a fortune 500 company will have special skills that nobody else has. The skills can be learnt mostly. But at companies this big, a CEO is an asset, a good CEO that can provide more growth and profit than anyone else will command a salary, and the market forces ensure that the salary they earn is inline with how much value they bring to the company.
And these people still pay tax, and a lot of it. It’s not possible to argue that a CEO is overpaid because CEO pay at this level is defined by the Market.
You must be disconnected from reality to think like that. What incredible skills do Bezos and Musk have to gain 10000% more than all of their employees combined?
Most businesses thrive despite CEOs, not thanks to them. Worker-owned cooperatives are reliably more stable.
Have you heard of the Panama papers?
Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are different to people like Tim Cook and Satya Nadella. Bezos took a relatively low salary when he was CEO of Amazon, and Musk takes supposedly no salary, because they don’t earn their wealth from a salary. Tim Cook doesn’t need to be more productive than some factory worker in China making 50 iPhones a day, because if paying him $100mn a year makes Apple $110mn a year vs someone else who takes $50k a year and brings Apple $2mn. They still take Cook because the profit is $10mn vs $1.95mn. Like I said, it’s about who can make the most money for the company.
I am very very sceptical about your claim that most businesses thrive without CEOs. Every medium to large company has a CEO, unless it’s a cooperative in which case they have a chair (and in large cooperatives, these chairs still command high salaries). John Lewis, the largest cooperative in the UK, has a chair who earns a salary of £990k.
And finally some people do dodge tax, not everyone does. In 2016, Tim Cook was awarded a $135mn salary, on which he paid $70mn in taxes. What am I supposed to say to this point really? Some people commit tax fraud, it’s still a crime. Maybe it’s not followed as much as it should be, but it’s still illegal.