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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.
Really, Starbucks is your example? Starbucks? In the year of our Lord 2025, Starbucks?
The CEO of Starbucks has been around for a year. Starbucks has lost 16% of its value in a year that the SP500 has gained 13%. Relative to just parking your money in an index fund, the CEO of Starbucks has during his regime lost you 30%.
Same store sales sank year over year continuing a downward trend. 70% of customers plan to visit less. Corporate plans to emphasize Starbucks as a 'Third Place' have fallen as pearls before swine. Starbucks' customer base is getting older, cutting their spending, and less committed than they used to be. Starbucks is closing locations at the same time that competitors, from Dutch Bros to Wawa (sieg heil!) are expanding their espresso offerings to take bites out of Starbucks' market. Dutch Bros stock is up 65% year over year. Starbucks is cutting jobs and locations at a time when their competitors are growing.
So sure, the CEO's pay has little to do with the hourly pay of workers. But, what kind of boot licker looks at a $95mm salary and says he earned it without asking what his VORP is? Because I'm sure they couldn't have done too much worse for $50mm.
It's one thing to talk about Elon Musk's pay package, as without Elon Tesla's valuation probably halves overnight. It's one thing to talk about Jeff Bezos' wealth, who built a dominant and revolutionary company. But Starbucks? GM? HP? It's hard to justify what these guys are getting paid to be mediocre.
No one has quite solved these kinds of incentive problems.
To be clear I'm not saying the CEO of Starbucks earned his pay. That's a separate topic. I'm saying it really has nothing do with how much baristas are being paid. The localized economics of the individual Starbucks location matter much more and the union, which presumably wants to improve pay for baristas, is barking up the wrong tree by making the conversation about the CEO's pay. The reason baristas aren't paid more is because the work they're doing is not that valuable, and no amount of collective bargaining will make value spontaneously appear.
And this is why unions are historically organized as locals with membership policies to generate a scarcity in a particular market.
It really just sounds like they want a minimum wage increase so that barista served coffees cost $20. But that has other problems.
But baristas don’t make anywhere near the minimum wage.
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