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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.
People's value functions are based on envy/their relative position. A lot of people would be objectively happier being upper middle class in 1925 than lower middle class in 2025 despite the latter being materially a lot better off, happier living poor in a poor neighbourhood over living average in a rich neighbourhood, and happier earning $50k under a CEO earning $60k than earning $60k under a CEO earning $80m.
Well maybe, I won't deny envy as a factor, but the ability to buy property is another huge factor. People who can afford property tend to be a lot more content than those who can't. Regardless of wealth disparity or relative social class.
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And therein lies the tragedy of humanity. As La Rochefoucald said: The truest mark of being born with great qualities is to be born without envy. I was not so fortunate but have over the years tried to kill the envy in me because in the end it's just destructive. Perhaps we should have compulsory lessons on this in school for everyone to make the average man content with his average life instead of trying to pull down his betters.
I suspect that there would be less envy in the world if people got the impression that those above them were trying to pull everyone else up to their level rather than trying to keep them down.
Would it? Or would they just blame them even more?
In any case, I don’t understand why they should help. Help me or I’ll envy you and make things difficult sounds like extortion.
Because the obscene concentration of wealth that allows those elites to exist requires the existence of a coherent and functioning society. You can't have millionaire layabouts and the idle rich without somebody to actually do the work, and if those people believe that current social arrangements have lost their legitimacy then things can change very, very fast. The French aristocracy didn't give a shit about the concerns of smelly peasants and didn't want to help them out at all, but that famously did not end particularly well for the aristocracy.
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