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Notes -
It's a bit different though. The pressure to cut expenses comes from the top down. But there's no one above the board of directors who can hold them accountable- they're already at the top! Many of them serve on multiple boards at once, and rotate in and out of CEO or other C-level jobs at other companies, so they have a strong "class interest" in pushing up CEO pay in general. They might get some bad press or worker grumbling about unfairness, but there's no one that can actually fire them for setting the CEO pay too high. In theory I guess the general stockholders could all come together to do it, but they're so disorganized that it never happens. The only practical way to force them out is for some corporate raider to do a hostile takeover, and even then there's golden parachute clauses designed in part to preevent that sort of thing.
also worth noting that the ratio of CEO pay to average worker pay has massively increased over the last few decades. So it may well just continue to increase until they're taking home some large fraction of the company's total revenue as their personal salary. Or maybe the CEO ends up with all of the company's stock (making it harder and harder for regular shareholders to oppose them) and they become a private company, like SpaceX already is.
edit: most of the starbucks board members are current or former CEOs of other companies. They directly benefit from raising CEO pay, since that sets a higher baseline for themselves to justify their own pay. This isn't some abstract "class consciousness thing," there's a very small group of CEOs and board members who are tightly connected.
I wonder if he was awarded 1% of all the USSR's money as a reward for his services? That should be fair, right? Or did he not get anything at all? Our intuitions for what's fair really fail at this kind of scale. (edit: he was not rewarded. it was seen as an embarassment for the entire Soviet system and was quietly swept under the rug)
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