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C-suite salaries are so high in America I'm wondering if these sort of co-ops could be more competitive on that cost saving alone.
by JTbane 2y ago
C-suite salaries are so high in America I'm wondering if these sort of co-ops could be more competitive on that cost saving alone.
- zbyforgotp 2y agoIt is an interesting question why they don’t outcompete other businesses.
- yoyohello13 2y agoMost likely because growth is not really the primary goal. If an organization has any goals besides growth at all costs it will fall behind.
- office_drone 2y agoThe simple explanation is that the actions of C-suite executives add value, even after factoring in their compensation
- skulk 2y agoshades of https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995 https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995
- NovemberWhiskey 2y agoJamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, was paid $36M in 2023. The company had, at the end of the year, 310,000 employees. So we can assume that if got paid zero, the company would've been able to distribute about $116 to each of them. Doesn't look very compelling to me, in that particular case.
- enraged_camel 2y agoCool, now combine the salaries of the entire C-suite. That’s what the parent comment is referring to.
- nullhole 2y agoAlso maybe do it across a few more industries.
- yakshaving_jgt 2y agoAlso maybe move whatever other goalposts you can find until the Marxist theory begins to make sense.
- hollerith 2y agoAlso keep stubbornly clinging to the idea that organizing and coordinating workers is not real work.
- anigbrowl 2y agoIt is, but it's not worth the massive sums some executives pay themselves.
- enraged_camel 2y agoHaha, imagine being the type of person who attacks anyone who criticizes ultra-high C-suite salaries by calling them a "Marxist".
- yakshaving_jgt 2y agoHow is it an attack? What would be a more accurate descriptor for someone who appears to subscribe to the idea of an oppressed class and an oppressor class?
- enraged_camel 2y agoThis has nothing to do with class warfare. We're talking about individuals who make several orders of magnitude more money than regular employees, despite the impossibility of demonstrating that they add an equivalent amount of value to the organization. The idea isn't "everyone should make the same amount", the idea is that pay should be proportional to one's value add.
- DragonStrength 2y agoI believe the idea is you replace individuals who solely manage across the board, with the idea management is really a part time job. That so many executives split their time would suggest that might very well be the case. With that in mind, there are many efficiencies imaginable beyond just the C-suite. And the employees now have ownership, so they have more of a reason to take up more responsibility than the current environment where employees are increasingly detached from their work, for good reason.
- TeMPOraL 2y agoHuh, that sounds like taking yet another full-time job and smearing its workload across everyone. That already happened with quite a lot of occupations - thanks to "increased productivity" brought by computers, a typical white-collar employee is now also doing the job of a secretary (calendar, mail, setting up meetings), graphics department (PowerPoint), financial department (managing and reporting travel expenses), and couple other ones as well. And then everyone is surprised that real productivity doesn't seem to track the theoretical increase brought by technology. Well, maybe because most of that turns out to be replacing legible expense (salaries of well-defined jobs) with larger, illegible ones (everyone else doing tiny bit of extra work). Feels to me that your proposal would end up being just another case of that.
- jancsika 2y ago> graphics department (PowerPoint) You started the paragraph with the word "workload," but here the load is about as close to zero for the average employee as one could get without being pedantic about it. People aren't using virtual brushes and learning color theory to digitally paint their PowerPoints, or even composing their slides effectively in the visual space provided as a graphic designer would in Photoshop. They are writing and revising their drafts in PowerPoint, often using the default templates or perhaps 2-3 minutes of trying out different themes. That ends up smearing all the costs and benefits of default PowerPoint look-and-feel across the audience for all these boring presentations. But I claim the cost to the employee's time and education due to them technically having taken on the responsibilities of a graphic designer are, on average, effectively zero.
- tossandthrow 2y agoIf we factor in not just C-suite but the entire middle to top management, then I definitely think there is something to come for. Though, in the end, the US is extremely adversarial. So these people standing to loose out on the competition would do anything to stifle such innovations.
- mistermann 2y agoThe US reputedly has the best Democracy money can buy.
- dexterdog 2y agoSo in this utopia does the organization run with no management at all or does management all work for $0?
- mvc 2y agoUnlike some of these executives, we're not animals. We won't make them work for less than the living wage. But there will be fewer perks.
- tossandthrow 2y agowut? where does this comment even come from? are you under the belief that you either earn 400k a year or 0? what if middle management just got a reasonable compensation in line with what ordinary people earn? this is actually not even a foreign concept in the us. just look to the 60s.
- AndrewKemendo 2y agoIt’s really the non-employee shareholders that take the value, so instead of comparing with CEO and management, you should instead be asking: “How to transfer ownership of all publicly traded shares such that they are owned solely by the employees and not non-employee investors” CEOs and management are simply there to prevent the above from happening, which is why they are paid by the board so much. The boards are the unelected non-employee owners that need to go away
- fransje26 2y ago> not non-employee investors I must be thick, but I fail to understand how shareholders are "investors" of a publicly traded company? Yes, at some point, the company went to the market, and large sums of cash were exchanged for company shares, with the promise of a future return of part of the profit on that share. So yes, that moment could be seen as an investment. But from that point onward, holding a share of a traded company has nothing to do with investment. Share holders are exchanging shares on the stock market, but at no point is any of that money going back to the companies they are trading shares of. They are just exchanging the "profit sharing promise" among each other, with no positive financial impact on the companies whatsoever. Quite the contrary, as they eat up a huge quantity of the available net profit, that could have been reinvested in the companies themselves.
- AndrewKemendo 2y agoIPO creates the “public market investment vehicle” by liquidating the assets of the private equity holders onto retail investors. In single share class companies then, the entirety of the “value” from a financial perspective is held in stocks and corporate bonds. Whomever owns these, has voting and control rights in a way that non-voting equity holders do not. Notably almost no public companies give voting shares to employees- I’m sure there are examples but incredibly rare. Shareholders benefit materially from the labor of the company by holding the asset that (theoretically) accretes value with no actual labor inputs. That means that anyone doing labor is paying the shareholders from their paycheck every month. Why is it like this, because the contracts people sign and the egregious power disparity makes it such that capital, the voting share holders, have ALL of the value that they can turn trade or liquidate or whatever because they gave money for shares and more shares means more power in the company. The board ultimately encourages this because they are only interested in capital returns and stock price.
- Ericson2314 2y agoC-suite compensation, especially stock-based, is often in part to ensure management loyalty to shareholders vs other things. Worker board membership means management once again has competing loyalties, but now de jure. That means it is not worth it to the share holders to pay the extra "ransom compensation", in addition to workers probably outright being against it. I would thus expect C-suite compensation to go down.
- FrustratedMonky 2y ago"ensure management loyalty to shareholders" Everyone's pay is to keep them, isn't it? Nobody is loyal beyond being paid. Do CEO's really provide so much 'extra' benefit to justify the premium? Is their loyalty in particular worth paying so much for? I'm just not seeing how 'ransom' is needed. Isn't growing a healthy business supposed to be the goal for CEO and Board? And if employee owned, it is same. The only reason to pay the extra 'ransom' to be loyal to shareholders, is when they want the CEO to do things that are 'not' for the benefit of the company, but only to benefit shareholders, who can sell and exit.
- monknomo 2y agoI think the question is who is the business healthy for, and who is the c-suite and up loyal to? It is possible, and even likely, that a healthy business differs in some material ways for a CEO+board than its employees, though I also expect there are also overlaps
- Ericson2314 2y agoThe ways the stock price influences a business that already has gone public are subtle and not to be taken for granted
- oersted 2y agoThey actually have a lot of difficulty in hiring good directors for this exact reason, they have widened the gap several times and are planning to keep widening it.
- office_drone 2y agoCoops have a hard time hiring directors because they can get paid more in standard corporations? What a heartwarming story of employees knowing their worth and not settling for less.