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I have a really hard time with CEO vs worker pay discussions. It kind of drives me crazy. Lets take Starbucks, since I'm currently hearing unions complain about the disparity right now. The argument mostly feels like math blindness, but maybe my problem is that I'm bringing an abacus to a knife fight.
The Starbucks CEO makes $95 million a year. They argue this is outrageous because their employees only make $20/hour or whatever.
Why not complete the math? What if we took the Starbucks CEO, fired him, and redistributed his $95 million a year a salary to the workers? Well, the 361,000 workers would see their pay bumped by about $1 per day. It's really hard to get across that the workers at each Starbucks already capture a huge portion of the value of the cup of coffee they serve (aside from real estate costs, cost of goods, etc). The Starbucks CEO takes perhaps a 1 cent from that cup.
This is a simple economic fact that seems almost impossible to communicate. Unionization won't improve worker pay on this front because there isn't much on a per unit basis that can be squeezed to give to workers.
I mean, the union could say lets increase the cost of coffee at Starbucks by 2.5x so that every employee can now afford a 3 bedroom 2 bathroom house in their neighborhood but then their competitors would eat their lunch. And customers might actually be pretty outraged by the idea of paying $18 for a blended coffee plus tip. So, the unions don't try this angle.
In my town a particular annoying version of this argument is happening regarding a company that distributes Pepsi products in the region. They somehow ended up with a union 50 years ago which includes a pension. The company recently announced they can't fucking afford to give employees a pension anymore for the very not valuable job of delivering cases of Diet Pepsi to 7-11s all day and they want to switch them over to an 401k. This was an enormous outrage and the delivery people have been on strike over this for a year now. Going by the town's reaction, they seem to believe thousands of dollars per case of soda being delivered are waiting to be wrestled away from the evil classists who run the company.
It never occurs to anyone to learn to do something more valuable. Just that they need to win the fight against the classists, a fight that could not change anything if they won.
How much unrest is actually caused by failure to reason through 9th grade math regarding your personal conditions?
Is any of this even about actually improving worker conditions? I know it's cliche to be skeptical of unions but I honestly don't understand their modern presence at all.
This happens because labor theory of value is rather instinctive, as it appeals to our innate sense of fairness, even if it's wrong and inefficient. In which, of course, there is no realistic way a CEO could be doing thousands of times the amount of labor that his subordinates do, so there is no fair way in which they should be taking home thousands of times the pay as these subordinates.
Once people realize that there is no fair objective way of pricing goods and services, including labor, then they can understand why they should accept the inequalities created by a market.
*EDIT : Of course, that matters for mistake theorists. Conflict theorists that do know better than to believe in labor theory of value will still gladly invoke it to agitate against their opponents.
The thing people mess up the most is that the CEO isn't competing with them for their salary, the CEO is competing against other CEOs. A bad CEO can absolutely destroy a company, so a company will pay as much as it can afford to have a good one.
What's your opinion on the CEOs that seem to continuously get hired after driving companies into the ground?
I can't tell if there's some massive moral hazard involved, or just plain incompetence on the part of the board.
I'm still wrestling with this one personally.
Sometimes you see CEOs that roll into a company, drive it completely into the dirt, but in a way where all the board members get filthy rich. Weird structured mergers that saddle the brand with insane amounts of debt, and then it declares bankruptcy and then the board makes a killing selling it piecemeal. There is a suspicion this is what Intel's board/CEO are planning on doing. Just rip the company to shreds and make themselves filthy rich selling the x86 license, the fabs, the business to business contracts to the highest bidder.
You see this constantly with Indian CEOs and their ruthless value extraction. Every year, Microsoft for example, gets exponentially worse. Every year they shitcan more Americans, hire more H1Bs, treat customers more adversarial while offering a worse product. But profits go up, share holders are happy, so every year it continues. At least on paper. It's almost impossible for me to reckon that this can continue forever. That they aren't eating their seed corn in some fundamental way. That at some point the tech debt they continually accumulate won't cause the Microsoft ecosystem to be such a risk to run, that there is an institutional push to abandon it.
But I suppose the phrase "There is a lot of ruin in a nation" goes for trillion dollar companies too. There is a lot of value left to extract, and a lot of enshittification yet to pursue with a trillion dollar market cap. But I'm sure they'll find some way to convert all $1,000,000,000,000 into H1B Visas.
The hard part, though, is that if that is true, if you know for certain that they are eating their seed corn, then my friend you have tremendous alpha and should put all your money betting on Microsoft going belly up.
These risks are not separate from the valuation, they are priced in. And while I also really, really dislike the direction Microsoft has taken, they are making a killing on cloud licenses, especially Office 365. Pretty much every company I work with and for has to pay a monthly per employee tax to Microsoft.
I don’t think that’s true, or at least not necessarily true. Microsoft has a huge advantage in “lock in”, meaning that you run into a lot of problems if a company decides to go with other software platforms. The files they depend on to run their business are made in Microsoft products and thus in many cases, unless the company had the foresight to enforce a rule that ensures that they didn’t all save all their stuff in formats that only Microsoft can use, switching to something else imposes a burden. That’s before considering the learning curve for switching to a new company. It’s enough of a PITA that most don’t switch unless the software is really bad.
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