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This is missing the point. Do you think anyone complaining about starbucks unionizing would be satisfied if starbucks stock instead grew at 10x the rate of the s&p500?
It's not missing the point, it's bringing up another separate point that bears on the argument.
If Starbucks paid I-beam X Kendo $200mm per year for a sinecure as grand czar of diversity equity and inclusion it also wouldn't have anything to do with worker pay, but it would be manifestly unjust and many people would point it out. The CEO is manifestly overpaid and everyone is going to point that out to their own ends.
Costco, for example, doesn't have this problem. Costco is well run, pays its people well, treats them well, and has had an excellent run of fairly compensated CEOs. Costco pays a total of $20mm including stock. Is Starbucks doing better than Costco? (No) Is Starbucks more complex than Costco? (No) Why does he make 5x for a worse performance? Why do GM and Ford perpetually pay their CEOs multiples of what Toyota and Honda pay while Toyota and Honda completely muscled Detroit out of the car market?
CEO overpayment is an obvious and manifest injustice, so of course people are going to latch onto that. Saying well it's a big company with a lot of money sloshing around so stealing a few bucks is no big deal is the morality of the shoplifter and the lazy employee, not the profit maximizing shareholder or the diligent corporate steward.
Starbucks probably had problems under Howard Schultz, but no one ever really complained about his pay in the same way, because the company was growing like a weed and treated its workers better at the time.
Starbucks used to be a well regarded employer. I think what changed was the macroeconomic conditions. They went from being a novel third place coffee house with charming exposed duct work and chill vibe to being kind of a place that serves something you can get at five other stores in the vicinity and they want you out the door ASAP.
Perhaps they can be blamed for not having a monopoly on the chill coffee shop vibe forever, but the fact remains most coffee shops don't make much money. No barista anywhere is buying a 3 bedroom 2 bathroom house.
The lower blue collar labor market has also gotten a lot tighter- there's been a greying of the population, lots of people got addicted to welfare during covid and aren't willing to work anymore, illegals don't work at starbucks but labor has a certain amount of fungibility, etc. Conditions/benefits/pay at starbucks-type jobs have just genuinely improved everywhere, it's harder to stand out. I've seen the desperate competition for workers.
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It doesn't bear on the argument because it's got nothing to do with the argument. The argument is that CEOs are parasitizing comp that should be going to the barista, and the barista union will undo this injustice.
Trying to shoehorn in concerns about CEO performance is missing the point at best and quokkadom at worst ("wow, the union and I both think the CEO is overpaid, we must have a common cause! Comrades, what do you mean you don't care about the stock going up?")
Okay, but Google, for example is (reasonably) well run, has vastly outperformed the S&P over the past five years, pays its employees pretty well, and people still bitch about the CEO comp. "Well, he screwed up when he laid off all th-" "but google employees don't get paid at top of ma-" no, this is a competitive business, nobody does everything right, the point is that the company is doing well and employees are paid fantastic amounts.
Why are Starbucks baristas and Google engineers alike complaining about this? It's because of leftism. Nothing to do with CEO performance.
Yeah, agreed, bad CEOs should get the boot. The mistake is to think this has anything to do with the amount of comp that the rank and file get.
Bad CEOs are bad for the rank and file because if your employer goes out of business it's bad news. That's about it. The other points you mention are much more relevant for investors than employees who stand to gain about tree-fiddy a week if the CEO takes a 50% paycut.
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