2y ago

CEO pay has skyrocketed 1,460% since 1978

www.epi.org

CEO pay has skyrocketed 1,460% since 1978: CEOs were paid 399 times as much as a typical worker in 2021

"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"

Antiwork @lemmy.ml

Sahwa @reddthat.com

2y ago

CEO pay has skyrocketed 1,460% since 1978: CEOs were paid 399 times as much as a typical worker in 2021

www.epi.org /publication/ceo-pay-in-2021/

39 comments

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.
  
  Not that well trained. Pretty sure SmarterChild would suffice.
  
  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.
- 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.
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.
- Well of course they don't see anything wrong with this, they're getting paid not to see anything wrong with it. They're paid astronomical amounts of money to keep the status quo by people even richer than them.
- 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.
- I mean, hamburgers already cost around $10-$15 anyway... and that's without workers getting a pay increase
But guys, just imagine what that's going to do for us when it starts to trickle down... like any minute now....
- Nope, still just piss
Feudalism never went away, it just changed its name.
- capitalism has become economic slavery
Eat the rich.
compare to only 273% (and six tenths) for the federal minimum wage since jan 1, 1978 (was $2.65, is $7.25). it would be $39/hr if it increased at the same rate at CEO pay over that time frame.
Alternative analysis for the WSJ: CEOs endure crisis after crisis - CEOs pay has shown massive cuts on several occasions in the last few years. While average workers salaries have steadily grown in the last 45 years, the pay of CEOs has been regularly affected by enormous cuts, sometimes as much as 45℅.
Bozo McGill, representative for the CEOs in distress: "maybe it's time to stop caring about the poor. Let's reduce taxes for the CEOs, otherwise they won't afford a Lambo a month anymore"
Do those valleys correspond to surges in small startups?

39 comments