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Comment by Kyragem | Hacker News Reader

Oligarchy at its best: Aetna/CVS workers mostly making minimum wage and doing all the work while the CEOs earning insane paychecks. Would this guy really be worse off if he only made 50M and the other 450M would go to the employees?

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Do you really think the employees making minimum wage are doing "all the work?" If that's true, this guy did literally nothing. Which I doubt. Anyway, it seems like he's done a decent job of trying to spread the wealth around (no idea if the claims are true, of course). FTA:

"He is one of the highest-profile leaders in managed care, known partly for sharing his personal health-care experiences after a severe ski accident years ago, and he is well-regarded by investors. He drew attention outside the industry for boosting the incomes of Aetna’s lowest-paid workers by as much as one-third a few years ago; he asked Aetna executives at the time to read economist Thomas Piketty’s book on wealth inequality."

$450m would work out to $900 per employee (assuming 50k employees), not bad for a bonus.

edit: As commenters below pointed out correct number is $9,000 per employee, which would have made for a pretty awesome Christmas bonus.

If we also include CVS employees (240k) the bonus drops to $1,552 which is still pretty good.

CVS alone had over 240k employee in 2016. [1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CVS_Pharmacy

Aetna has ~50,000 people so this is 450m/50k = 9,000$ each for them not exactly nothing. CVS has more workers but they are paid less so 1,900$ means ~1.5 months of pay to someone making 7.25$ an hour before taxes.

I don't mean to suggest this is a significant issue on it's own, but high level executive compensation really does add up to a significant cost at large corporations. And really, this is just stock compensation he received other pay and benefits.

Think you meant 9,000 per employee in this case.

I'd love to know what the average raise % for rank and file employees was over that time period of success.

would you accept $50 bonus and $1 to each of your 450 covorkers if you were set to receive $500 bonus instead?

Interesting how that question is phrased.

Would you accept $50 (million dollar)? Hell yeah.

What would you choose between $50 and $500. Maybe $500, not sure if I could live with myself, but I can see how some people would.

But why is $500 even on the table? Why isn't someone (a board, a shareholders' meeting) telling this guy: $50 (million) should be enough.

because that bonus is based on how much he saved or made for that company. he/she must have saved/made the company at least 3 times as much and was promised the bonus by that same board if he achieves the goal. board does not gift him the bonus, board owes him.

the fact that you think 50 dollars and 50 million are equivalent...

That's not really a valid comparison. The real-world difference between $50 and $500 is much greater than the real-world difference between $50,000,000 and $500,000,000.

$450 to most of the population is a meaningful amount that could help pay rent/mortgate, buy food, pay for daycare, etc. $450,000,000 to someone who already has $50,000,000 just means stepping up to a megayacht.

Perhaps a more apt analogy would be the following:

Would you be happy if you Product Manager at work got a bonus of 10,000 times your salary for managing a wildly successful and profitable project to completion when you and your coworkers did most of the grunt work?

So the workers should be paid less if the companies profits fall?

edit: feel free to join the conversation silent downvoting cowards

They already face the risk of getting laid off.

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