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$20 for skilled labor in this industry seems very low. The bump to $22.13 when CEO gets a bump in the millions is really throwing the finger to workers everywhe

$20 for skilled labor in this industry seems very low. The bump to $22.13 when CEO gets a bump in the millions is really throwing the finger to workers everywhere.

charcircuit 5y ago
The CEO has a much more important role of actually running the company and it is hard to find people capable of running such a large company.
- freeone3000 5y ago
  I guess we'll see how important that role is without any workers.
  - Sevastopol 5y ago
    The average worker is not special and easily replaceable, so workers as a whole organise for changes. The CEO's work is still more consequential, however. You can find new engineers and programmers but it'll be relatively hard to find good replacements for executives like Shotwell, Nadella, Huang, etc.
    - esarbe 5y ago
      > The CEO's work is still more consequential, however. Ah, I don't know about that. In the end what CEOs get payed for is to have someone to blame in case anything goes wrong. medicore performance never got a CEO fired, it's just when something goes terribly wrong that they have to take their hats. Usually there's a golden parachute attached. CEOs are overrated.
      - Sevastopol 5y ago
        No. CEOs make important decisions about how a company is run and its future. Some companies might share responsibilities differently.
        esarbe 5y ago
        > CEOs make important decisions about how a company is run and its future. I've yet to work in a (large) company where the CEO is actually relevant. Most of the decisions happen at lower, departmental levels. In the initial years, CEOs can make or break a company, but after that it's pretty random. You can have a brilliant CEO that just gets stumped and the company goes bust. Or you can have an incompetent CEO that just stumbles from success to success. In my experience, CEOs get hired because of their old-boys networks that will allow the company to participate to the pay-to-play games with e.g. financial institutes or similar industry handshake-wink-wink-partnerships. They know people that know people, that's it.
        Sevastopol 5y ago
        If the board is incompetent, then the CEO will usually be incompetent too. A CEO doesn't make every decision for the company, just the important ones. A new CEO has great impact on a company's present and future unless the company is already organized to give /other executives/ most of his or her responsibilities. At the companies I've worked at, lower levels never make far-reaching decisions for the company.
        esarbe 5y ago
        In all the companies I've worked at, never has a CEO made a decision that made a company successful. The best thing a CEO can do when it comes to decisions that make a company successful is one thing; recognize good ideas and get the hell out of the way of the people implementing that decision. That's what incompetent CEOs usually do; they get in the way of competent people doing a heck of a job. Good CEOs know that they are figureheads and try to stay out of the crucial decision making, handing off responsibilities to people that actually know what they are doing.
        Sevastopol 5y ago
        > In all the companies I've worked at, never has a CEO made a decision that made a company successful. Hasn't been the case for me. Even if they didn't come up with, say, a market strategy, they're important in executing it. They lead rather than getting the hell out of the way. >Good CEOs know that they are figureheads and try to stay out of the crucial decision making, handing off responsibilities to people that actually know what they are doing. A good CEO makes critical decisions. Handing off responsibilities if they know their limits is indeed part of being a good CEO.
    - afroboy 5y ago
      So you telling me if the people where united in a way that they will organize a strike against a specific company, that company will no longer exist? So workers does matter they just have to adapt to the mentality of strikes.
      - Sevastopol 5y ago
        The average worker (singular) does not matter, but they can organise to make demands. You didn't add anything new.
        esarbe 5y ago
        Isn't that just what CEOs do? Not add anything new?
        Sevastopol 5y ago
        No. CEOs are responsible for strategy, policy, and organisation. One CEO can make or break a company, one worker can't.
        esarbe 5y ago
        > No. CEOs are responsible for strategy, policy, and organisation. I doubt that. In larger companies - the ones that actually have a CEO and not just a very hard working company owner - CEOs are usually pretty much isolated from any strategy, policy or organisation. For that they have upper management. > One CEO alone can do shit. A successful company needs competent workers, the right ideas from engineers and artists, diligent bureaucrats and most of all; a hell a lot of luck. Given all that, even a company with a mediocre CEO can be vastly successful. CEOs are mostly there for the handshakes and because they know people that know people. That's about it.
        Sevastopol 5y ago
        CEOs are very involved in strategy, especially when a company is going through a transition. A CEO that can properly navigate the business world through 'handshakes' is important too. Boards pay them lots for a reason. A good CEO is much harder to replace than a few engineers.
  - robomartin 5y ago
    > we'll see how important that role is without any workers We've known the answer to this question for decades: Very important. You can export entire factories to China, layoff everyone in manufacturing, keep management and design in country. Works just fine. Don't believe me? How about this short list: Computing hardware. Hand tools. Medical equipment. Home appliances. Office supplies. Power tools. Etc. What do they have in common? Offshore manufacturing.
    - gcheong 5y ago
      Just fine until you can’t get product back into the country because of supply chain issues.
      - flyinglizard 5y ago
        Supply chain issues apply for components and raw materials too.
    - consp 5y ago
      The same logic applies to the management and design. There is no reason a cheaper workforce cannot do that as well. I wonder why that has not been done yet...
      - robomartin 5y ago
        > The same logic applies to the management and design. There is no reason a cheaper workforce cannot do that as well. This is definitely the case. There's a huge pool of talent outside of the US and Europe. One of the mistakes people tend to make is this assumption that you can torture (being dramatic) capital and it will not react, it will just bend to the pressure. This is as wrong as can be. Capital is the easiest thing to move from place to place. And capital, with enough pressure, will always move where it can achieve the same outcome with a lower pain-in-the-ass factor. Despite the popular indoctrinated meme, no, it isn't about greed. It's about getting shit done and staying in business. Our "leaders" over the last 50 years or so, setup a perfect storm, a chain reaction, that is unavoidable for anyone in manufacturing save a few corner cases (military contractors being one category). Say you manufactured coffee mugs. You are doing great. You have two other competitors with equal market shares. One of them decides they'll be smart, move manufacturing to China, lower their prices and grab more market share. They do the math: They are going to make LESS per unit, but think they can increase their market share to compensate for that, and more. They come into the market with their new Chinese made line. You lose a bunch of market share. So does the other competitor. What do you do? You can (1) lower your prices and operate at a loss; (2) lay off a bunch of people to reduce labor costs and use automation to lower your costs; (3) shut down the business and exit the market or (4) move your manufacturing to China. That's it. There might be other options which are generally combinations of the four options given above. You move you manufacturing to China. A few months later, the remining competitor does the same. A year later all three companies are manufacturing in China. They all have about the same market share they had before the move. They are all selling at lower retail price point, which means they are all making less money! Oh, it doesn't end there. A few years later the same Chinese manufacture that makes their coffee mugs decides to sell directly in the US at a lower price. One of the advantages they have is that our "leaders" signed a treaty that makes shipping within the US free for any Chinese product (within certain limits). A Chinese company can get a product from Los Angeles to NYC for virtually free. A US company has to pay full rate for the same shipping. Two out of the three companies go out of business and even more people lose their jobs. > I wonder why that has not been done yet... Oh, it has. Virtually every discipline you can think of has been offshored. From accounting to software engineering and more. I have a quick personal example I can share: We needed to do a bunch of accounting analysis that required a bunch of data entry. Our accounting firm wanted somewhere in the order of $50K to get it done. We got it done by a team of business students in Romania for about a tenth of that. For security/privacy all we had to do was write code to redact (black out) private information (names, addresses, account numbers, etc.) on the thousands of documents they processed. This work required knowledgeable human analysis, so it wasn't a simple matter of OCR -> Excel -> summarize. Capital always tends to find the most efficient way to get things done. Except in government. In that case, assume half is wasted and that's probably about the right domain.
- Aloha 5y ago
  Can he assemble tractors?
  - charcircuit 5y ago
    That's not the job of a CEO.
    - zorpner 5y ago
      "I only know how to pay people to create new alloys!" https://www.angryflower.com/348.html https://www.angryflower.com/348.html
    - Aloha 5y ago
      I've managed people, I knew how to do their jobs in addition to my own, or at least enough about their jobs to know what questions to ask about them. I've often posited that many issues at large companies would be solved if the VP and SVP level folks were down doing the 'grunt' level work from time to time - like your VP of customer care should be on the phones one day a quarter, your VP of manufacturing should work the line once a quarter and so on. It's pretty easy to say from on high "well, how hard can it be, they don't deserve that much!" when you've never done the work - it's a whole lot harder if you have and do from time to time. The CEO, needs to be on the floor, and needs to understand every aspect of how the company does business, if not that (like for very large companies like GE and Tyco), at a minimum the division president level does. Being a CEO is more than just sitting in an office making strategic decisions, it's also having enough of a fundamental understanding of how your business works to know when you're being fed bullshit - you only get that by going out there and doing.
    - esarbe 5y ago
      They should be able to do it. Otherwise they don't actually know their products, right?
      - charcircuit 5y ago
        He can just ask someone for that information. It's not like you have to commit a few patches to a software project to know how to use it. I can use my operating just fine without having ever developed any of the software in it.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- tjr225 5y ago
  I’ve met a few CEOs in my 10 year career. They seem to just blow hot air and drift around on it. We all see it.
- klyrs 5y ago
  Is it, really, actually more important? Or do the CEO and board of like-minded folks who are executives at adjacent companies merely have more direct control over who gets the money? Because without the folks who actually make the tractors, the company quickly loses its primary source of income. What's the CEO's actual value-add?
  - refurb 5y ago
    I see this attitude a lot among younger workers with technical expertise. “How hard is running a company? Making “X” is what’s hard.” They then point to the fact they are at the top of their game and an expert and have a post-graduate degree. Their job is very hard and they are very skilled, no doubt. But once you get exposed to upper management you start to realize it’s really hard to get a large group of people to work towards a common goal. Stuff goes off the rails very easily when people don't understand, care of even know what the company is trying to accomplish and how that relates to their job. And convincing outside investors (public or private) that your business is actually worthwhile investing in and in "capable hands" isn't easy either. Yes, giving speeches and making “best guesses” on where the business is going seem trivial. But it’s a critical role where if not done well shit falls apart quickly. Remember, some hedge fund doesn't want to know the intricacies of your CPU design - they want to know your company has a product people want and you can deliver it to them profitably. There is a definite "we trust this guy can deliver" filter when it comes to CEOs and it's often based on track record (fairly or not). Look at Elon Musk. What is his value? Knowledge of rocket design? Knowledge of battery technology? Though I hear he’s technical his knowledge is trivial compared to the experts he hires. The depth of his expertise is likely asking his engineers which is best, asking some pointed questions and then making a call on the totality of everything at stake. His value is also in being “the face” of Tesla internally and externally. Motivating his employees with a vision when everyone is betting the company will fail. Convincing people they can do something no one has done before. Very few people can do that well and even fewer can do it for years like Musk did. Now of course very few CEOs are like that, but don’t underestimate the value of CEOs who successfully run even a small business. Those soft skills many technical people think are useless are critical and not many have them in one package. As such, if you've demonstrated you have the chops to run a billion dollar business you can ask for (and will get) a pay package that dwarfs a typical job. And of course you have grifter CEOs who are idiots, but say the right thing. No different than any other job. They don’t tend to last very long as CEOs either.
- Haga 5y ago
  Much more important? Most just let the process self optimize and look for shaddy short term bump deals. That job could be done better by a smart contract.
- gcheong 5y ago
  I would argue that the huge multiples in difference between CEOs and the average worker in pay are not the result if increasingly more important CEO’s
- Ar-Curunir 5y ago
  Yes, much more so than the people making the actual products...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- rswail 5y ago
  This is the nonsense that the CEO "union" of cross shareholding and executives serving on other boards leads to. The CEO sets the overall business strategy with the advice of the board. They then have to delegate that strategy to their subordinates for the different activities necessary. It's harder to find skilled workers with specific skills than it is to find a generic "CEO".
- cycomanic 5y ago
  Show me the statistics that relate CEO pay to long term company performance (we all know they can influence short term value easily). The studies im aware of show that quiet CEOs perform signicantly better than star CEOs on the long term (admittedly that is not equivalent to pay). Anecdotally company performance does not change significantly with change of CEO.
- onion2k 5y ago
  it is hard to find people capable of running such a large company The current CEO is paid $15m, and is currently responsible for the biggest strike in the company's history, an expensive settlement, and a huge number of unhappy customers who complain that they can't mend their tractors themselves to the point where the government has considered passing laws to ensure they can. Is it really so hard to find someone who'd do a better job than that for less money?
  - refurb 5y ago
    JD is seeing record profits right now and the stock is up 250% since the start of 2020. I'd say he's doing a pretty fantastic job for JD stockholders.
deelowe 5y ago
The CEO and the workers are not in competition with each other for similar jobs. Their pay is not at all connected in any way what so ever. Each person's pay is determined by what the market rate is. The politicians in Washington have convinced everyone that we should blame CEOs for the fact that our representatives have done a terrible job of maintaining a stable competitive market for low wage earners. The problem isn't that there are too many CEOs. There are too few. The problem with John Deere isn't it's success, but more specifically it's success at forcing others out of the market. When there are only 2 big employers in your town, guess what? You're going to make whatever they hell they want to pay you. But yeah, let's blame the CEOs.
- squarefoot 5y ago
  > let's blame the CEOs. I don't blame the CEOs, or their pay for that matter, I blame a system in which if a CEO goes home, s/he can spend one year golfing and the following one choosing among the offers from his/hers golfing friends, while if a worker becomes unemployed, s/he could starve within one month while having no way to find a new job.
- oceanghost 5y ago
  > Their pay is not at all connected in any way what so ever. This is so false that I have trouble believing you are serious. All pay comes from a fixed source, "income", and the CEO/board is largely who determines how the CEO and workers split up the money.
  - sjtindell 5y ago
    When an employee is hired they get a contract. Everyone is paid based on that. Which is usually determined by a market rate. What are you talking about?
    - bestcoder69 5y ago
      ...and where does the market rate come from? Written by God on a stone tablet, never to be questioned by management?

$20 for skilled labor in this industry seems very low. The bump to $22.13 when CEO gets a bump in the millions is really throwing the finger to workers everywhere.

charcircuit 5y ago

The CEO has a much more important role of actually running the company and it is hard to find people capable of running such a large company.

freeone3000 5y ago
I guess we'll see how important that role is without any workers.
- Sevastopol 5y ago
  The average worker is not special and easily replaceable, so workers as a whole organise for changes. The CEO's work is still more consequential, however. You can find new engineers and programmers but it'll be relatively hard to find good replacements for executives like Shotwell, Nadella, Huang, etc.
  - esarbe 5y ago
    > The CEO's work is still more consequential, however. Ah, I don't know about that. In the end what CEOs get payed for is to have someone to blame in case anything goes wrong. medicore performance never got a CEO fired, it's just when something goes terribly wrong that they have to take their hats. Usually there's a golden parachute attached. CEOs are overrated.
    - Sevastopol 5y ago
      No. CEOs make important decisions about how a company is run and its future. Some companies might share responsibilities differently.
      - esarbe 5y ago
        > CEOs make important decisions about how a company is run and its future. I've yet to work in a (large) company where the CEO is actually relevant. Most of the decisions happen at lower, departmental levels. In the initial years, CEOs can make or break a company, but after that it's pretty random. You can have a brilliant CEO that just gets stumped and the company goes bust. Or you can have an incompetent CEO that just stumbles from success to success. In my experience, CEOs get hired because of their old-boys networks that will allow the company to participate to the pay-to-play games with e.g. financial institutes or similar industry handshake-wink-wink-partnerships. They know people that know people, that's it.
        Sevastopol 5y ago
        If the board is incompetent, then the CEO will usually be incompetent too. A CEO doesn't make every decision for the company, just the important ones. A new CEO has great impact on a company's present and future unless the company is already organized to give /other executives/ most of his or her responsibilities. At the companies I've worked at, lower levels never make far-reaching decisions for the company.
        esarbe 5y ago
        In all the companies I've worked at, never has a CEO made a decision that made a company successful. The best thing a CEO can do when it comes to decisions that make a company successful is one thing; recognize good ideas and get the hell out of the way of the people implementing that decision. That's what incompetent CEOs usually do; they get in the way of competent people doing a heck of a job. Good CEOs know that they are figureheads and try to stay out of the crucial decision making, handing off responsibilities to people that actually know what they are doing.
        Sevastopol 5y ago
        > In all the companies I've worked at, never has a CEO made a decision that made a company successful. Hasn't been the case for me. Even if they didn't come up with, say, a market strategy, they're important in executing it. They lead rather than getting the hell out of the way. >Good CEOs know that they are figureheads and try to stay out of the crucial decision making, handing off responsibilities to people that actually know what they are doing. A good CEO makes critical decisions. Handing off responsibilities if they know their limits is indeed part of being a good CEO.
  - afroboy 5y ago
    So you telling me if the people where united in a way that they will organize a strike against a specific company, that company will no longer exist? So workers does matter they just have to adapt to the mentality of strikes.
    - Sevastopol 5y ago
      The average worker (singular) does not matter, but they can organise to make demands. You didn't add anything new.
      - esarbe 5y ago
        Isn't that just what CEOs do? Not add anything new?
        Sevastopol 5y ago
        No. CEOs are responsible for strategy, policy, and organisation. One CEO can make or break a company, one worker can't.
        esarbe 5y ago
        > No. CEOs are responsible for strategy, policy, and organisation. I doubt that. In larger companies - the ones that actually have a CEO and not just a very hard working company owner - CEOs are usually pretty much isolated from any strategy, policy or organisation. For that they have upper management. > One CEO alone can do shit. A successful company needs competent workers, the right ideas from engineers and artists, diligent bureaucrats and most of all; a hell a lot of luck. Given all that, even a company with a mediocre CEO can be vastly successful. CEOs are mostly there for the handshakes and because they know people that know people. That's about it.
        Sevastopol 5y ago
        CEOs are very involved in strategy, especially when a company is going through a transition. A CEO that can properly navigate the business world through 'handshakes' is important too. Boards pay them lots for a reason. A good CEO is much harder to replace than a few engineers.
- robomartin 5y ago
  > we'll see how important that role is without any workers We've known the answer to this question for decades: Very important. You can export entire factories to China, layoff everyone in manufacturing, keep management and design in country. Works just fine. Don't believe me? How about this short list: Computing hardware. Hand tools. Medical equipment. Home appliances. Office supplies. Power tools. Etc. What do they have in common? Offshore manufacturing.
  - gcheong 5y ago
    Just fine until you can’t get product back into the country because of supply chain issues.
    - flyinglizard 5y ago
      Supply chain issues apply for components and raw materials too.
  - consp 5y ago
    The same logic applies to the management and design. There is no reason a cheaper workforce cannot do that as well. I wonder why that has not been done yet...
    - robomartin 5y ago
      > The same logic applies to the management and design. There is no reason a cheaper workforce cannot do that as well. This is definitely the case. There's a huge pool of talent outside of the US and Europe. One of the mistakes people tend to make is this assumption that you can torture (being dramatic) capital and it will not react, it will just bend to the pressure. This is as wrong as can be. Capital is the easiest thing to move from place to place. And capital, with enough pressure, will always move where it can achieve the same outcome with a lower pain-in-the-ass factor. Despite the popular indoctrinated meme, no, it isn't about greed. It's about getting shit done and staying in business. Our "leaders" over the last 50 years or so, setup a perfect storm, a chain reaction, that is unavoidable for anyone in manufacturing save a few corner cases (military contractors being one category). Say you manufactured coffee mugs. You are doing great. You have two other competitors with equal market shares. One of them decides they'll be smart, move manufacturing to China, lower their prices and grab more market share. They do the math: They are going to make LESS per unit, but think they can increase their market share to compensate for that, and more. They come into the market with their new Chinese made line. You lose a bunch of market share. So does the other competitor. What do you do? You can (1) lower your prices and operate at a loss; (2) lay off a bunch of people to reduce labor costs and use automation to lower your costs; (3) shut down the business and exit the market or (4) move your manufacturing to China. That's it. There might be other options which are generally combinations of the four options given above. You move you manufacturing to China. A few months later, the remining competitor does the same. A year later all three companies are manufacturing in China. They all have about the same market share they had before the move. They are all selling at lower retail price point, which means they are all making less money! Oh, it doesn't end there. A few years later the same Chinese manufacture that makes their coffee mugs decides to sell directly in the US at a lower price. One of the advantages they have is that our "leaders" signed a treaty that makes shipping within the US free for any Chinese product (within certain limits). A Chinese company can get a product from Los Angeles to NYC for virtually free. A US company has to pay full rate for the same shipping. Two out of the three companies go out of business and even more people lose their jobs. > I wonder why that has not been done yet... Oh, it has. Virtually every discipline you can think of has been offshored. From accounting to software engineering and more. I have a quick personal example I can share: We needed to do a bunch of accounting analysis that required a bunch of data entry. Our accounting firm wanted somewhere in the order of $50K to get it done. We got it done by a team of business students in Romania for about a tenth of that. For security/privacy all we had to do was write code to redact (black out) private information (names, addresses, account numbers, etc.) on the thousands of documents they processed. This work required knowledgeable human analysis, so it wasn't a simple matter of OCR -> Excel -> summarize. Capital always tends to find the most efficient way to get things done. Except in government. In that case, assume half is wasted and that's probably about the right domain.
Aloha 5y ago
Can he assemble tractors?
- charcircuit 5y ago
  That's not the job of a CEO.
  - zorpner 5y ago
    "I only know how to pay people to create new alloys!" https://www.angryflower.com/348.html https://www.angryflower.com/348.html
  - Aloha 5y ago
    I've managed people, I knew how to do their jobs in addition to my own, or at least enough about their jobs to know what questions to ask about them. I've often posited that many issues at large companies would be solved if the VP and SVP level folks were down doing the 'grunt' level work from time to time - like your VP of customer care should be on the phones one day a quarter, your VP of manufacturing should work the line once a quarter and so on. It's pretty easy to say from on high "well, how hard can it be, they don't deserve that much!" when you've never done the work - it's a whole lot harder if you have and do from time to time. The CEO, needs to be on the floor, and needs to understand every aspect of how the company does business, if not that (like for very large companies like GE and Tyco), at a minimum the division president level does. Being a CEO is more than just sitting in an office making strategic decisions, it's also having enough of a fundamental understanding of how your business works to know when you're being fed bullshit - you only get that by going out there and doing.
  - esarbe 5y ago
    They should be able to do it. Otherwise they don't actually know their products, right?
    - charcircuit 5y ago
      He can just ask someone for that information. It's not like you have to commit a few patches to a software project to know how to use it. I can use my operating just fine without having ever developed any of the software in it.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
tjr225 5y ago
I’ve met a few CEOs in my 10 year career. They seem to just blow hot air and drift around on it. We all see it.
klyrs 5y ago
Is it, really, actually more important? Or do the CEO and board of like-minded folks who are executives at adjacent companies merely have more direct control over who gets the money? Because without the folks who actually make the tractors, the company quickly loses its primary source of income. What's the CEO's actual value-add?
- refurb 5y ago
  I see this attitude a lot among younger workers with technical expertise. “How hard is running a company? Making “X” is what’s hard.” They then point to the fact they are at the top of their game and an expert and have a post-graduate degree. Their job is very hard and they are very skilled, no doubt. But once you get exposed to upper management you start to realize it’s really hard to get a large group of people to work towards a common goal. Stuff goes off the rails very easily when people don't understand, care of even know what the company is trying to accomplish and how that relates to their job. And convincing outside investors (public or private) that your business is actually worthwhile investing in and in "capable hands" isn't easy either. Yes, giving speeches and making “best guesses” on where the business is going seem trivial. But it’s a critical role where if not done well shit falls apart quickly. Remember, some hedge fund doesn't want to know the intricacies of your CPU design - they want to know your company has a product people want and you can deliver it to them profitably. There is a definite "we trust this guy can deliver" filter when it comes to CEOs and it's often based on track record (fairly or not). Look at Elon Musk. What is his value? Knowledge of rocket design? Knowledge of battery technology? Though I hear he’s technical his knowledge is trivial compared to the experts he hires. The depth of his expertise is likely asking his engineers which is best, asking some pointed questions and then making a call on the totality of everything at stake. His value is also in being “the face” of Tesla internally and externally. Motivating his employees with a vision when everyone is betting the company will fail. Convincing people they can do something no one has done before. Very few people can do that well and even fewer can do it for years like Musk did. Now of course very few CEOs are like that, but don’t underestimate the value of CEOs who successfully run even a small business. Those soft skills many technical people think are useless are critical and not many have them in one package. As such, if you've demonstrated you have the chops to run a billion dollar business you can ask for (and will get) a pay package that dwarfs a typical job. And of course you have grifter CEOs who are idiots, but say the right thing. No different than any other job. They don’t tend to last very long as CEOs either.
Haga 5y ago
Much more important? Most just let the process self optimize and look for shaddy short term bump deals. That job could be done better by a smart contract.
gcheong 5y ago
I would argue that the huge multiples in difference between CEOs and the average worker in pay are not the result if increasingly more important CEO’s
Ar-Curunir 5y ago
Yes, much more so than the people making the actual products...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
rswail 5y ago
This is the nonsense that the CEO "union" of cross shareholding and executives serving on other boards leads to. The CEO sets the overall business strategy with the advice of the board. They then have to delegate that strategy to their subordinates for the different activities necessary. It's harder to find skilled workers with specific skills than it is to find a generic "CEO".
cycomanic 5y ago
Show me the statistics that relate CEO pay to long term company performance (we all know they can influence short term value easily). The studies im aware of show that quiet CEOs perform signicantly better than star CEOs on the long term (admittedly that is not equivalent to pay). Anecdotally company performance does not change significantly with change of CEO.
onion2k 5y ago
it is hard to find people capable of running such a large company The current CEO is paid $15m, and is currently responsible for the biggest strike in the company's history, an expensive settlement, and a huge number of unhappy customers who complain that they can't mend their tractors themselves to the point where the government has considered passing laws to ensure they can. Is it really so hard to find someone who'd do a better job than that for less money?
- refurb 5y ago
  JD is seeing record profits right now and the stock is up 250% since the start of 2020. I'd say he's doing a pretty fantastic job for JD stockholders.

deelowe 5y ago

The CEO and the workers are not in competition with each other for similar jobs. Their pay is not at all connected in any way what so ever. Each person's pay is determined by what the market rate is. The politicians in Washington have convinced everyone that we should blame CEOs for the fact that our representatives have done a terrible job of maintaining a stable competitive market for low wage earners. The problem isn't that there are too many CEOs. There are too few. The problem with John Deere isn't it's success, but more specifically it's success at forcing others out of the market. When there are only 2 big employers in your town, guess what? You're going to make whatever they hell they want to pay you. But yeah, let's blame the CEOs.

squarefoot 5y ago
> let's blame the CEOs. I don't blame the CEOs, or their pay for that matter, I blame a system in which if a CEO goes home, s/he can spend one year golfing and the following one choosing among the offers from his/hers golfing friends, while if a worker becomes unemployed, s/he could starve within one month while having no way to find a new job.
oceanghost 5y ago
> Their pay is not at all connected in any way what so ever. This is so false that I have trouble believing you are serious. All pay comes from a fixed source, "income", and the CEO/board is largely who determines how the CEO and workers split up the money.
- sjtindell 5y ago
  When an employee is hired they get a contract. Everyone is paid based on that. Which is usually determined by a market rate. What are you talking about?
  - bestcoder69 5y ago
    ...and where does the market rate come from? Written by God on a stone tablet, never to be questioned by management?