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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.
I feel like a much better target are the hordes of laptop-class, bullshit email jobs these giant companies seem to employ in droves. I worked at a grocery store that paid a triple digit salary to a 'Graciousness and Hospitality Coordinator' whose primary job consisted of slapping together poorly made PowerPoint Presentations which might have been titled 'How Not to Have Aspbergers Syndrome', meanwhile they can barely get product on the shelves because the place is so understaffed.
I have to imagine Starbucks has hordes of these silly positions whose jobs consist largely of sending emails and having Zoom meetings that have little to no effect on the overall functioning of any individual coffee stand. As a laborer who felt underpaid, these are the people I'd direct my ire towards. But in the framing of the political left, they're all a part of the 99%, and the Ceo isn't.
Most of the left are the laptop class doing bullshit jobs. Which I find rather hilarious. They act like email jobs are so stressful and demand even more money, but never really did anything honestly productive where results matter. It’s even funnier when you realize that most of these people who consider themselves working class have jobs that they couldn’t fail if they tried.
Interesting because it's been much, much harder for me to hold on to fake email jobs than my jobs delivering pizza and flowers. I left all the latter, the former left me (save for one).
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