They could all take massive pay cuts to preserve jobs. They have agency and they have chosen to enrich their stock price at the expense of people’s lives and well being.
The execs get paid a lot - but there's not that many of them, and there's 200k people at MSFT making an average salary (with benefits) >$200k. That's >$40B per year. The execs don't take home >$2B per year.
Satya made <$60M last year. There's not 35 execs at MSFT making the same amount of money or higher. There's 18 others, and they make a lot less money on average.
This 10k layoff, at an average salary of 190,302, is about $2b a year. So yeah not quite - but for them to suffer no consequences is still pretty gross.
This is in part, due to the fact that he has nothing to do with Microsoft anymore.
This part of your statement has no relevance given MS's position, even taking into account the current market.
MS as a company is in no danger here. In fact, they are doing quite well.
You hire people if you need them, fire them if you don't. It's really that simple.
Your employer doesn't owe you a job.
Do you have any actual numbers on the number of execs vs workers and their salaries?
Plus, every sale of the company's stock by a key executive is immediately reported to the SEC and publicly available on the SEC and company's websites. Wall street watches this like a hawk. If any key exec unloads more than a few percent of their entire holdings at any one time, it will hurt the stock price pretty substantially. Effectively, it makes it so the CEO can't sell a lot their stock at once while they are CEO.
The big numbers you see for CEO compensation for this year are largely stock options that were granted years prior which vested this year. Almost all of Satya's compensation is performance-based instead of guaranteed. The company he leads must deliver sustained profitable growth over the long-term for his comp to be worth a lot. The fact it's worth a lot this year is almost entirely due to him already delivering on his commitments to shareholders in the past. Keep in mind that the average public company CEO is in the CEO job less than five years. Satya is in the minority that is succeeding. Due to the high visibility of the CEO role, the majority who don't succeed have a high likelihood of never earning significant compensation again.
That's not our number at all. GP said "executives" which includes a lot more than the CEOs. For all I know 1% of the company could be executives
It's not how business works.
You hire people if you need people, and you pay them the least you can get away with, so you maximize profits - because long ago, you raised money with the promise to the people you raised the money from that you would do this, and you have a Fiduciary obligation to do so...
We agree then that employees should put in the least amount of work that they can get away with, right? Fair's fair.
They're particular individuals who will take a stance like what you're outlining and sit in a limbo state outside of performance firing them. They bring down team moral, high performing employees feel cheated, etc.
Please show me one public company that has said - sorry shareholders - we're returning 100%+ of profits to our employees forever.
You can't raise money from Shareholder A with the promise to never return the money.
That's a donation. Not gonna be able to raise money like you can from VCs and IPOs.
Being nice to workers, and never returning money to shareholders because you're overpaying your workers are two entirely different things.
FAANG has treated their workers quite well for a 10+ years, and shareholders have not cared, because profits and growth have been enormous.
They could've treated their workers much better and paid them 2-3x as much money, though. But they didn't. Because they would've gotten sued by shareholders.
Probably not. Google makes $1.6 million in revenue per employee, and $400k in profit per employee. Wages in tech for these money printing companies are more set by arbitrary norms than any real financial basis.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/217489/revenue-per-emplo...
Compared to unions and socialist ideals, FAANG has treated workers okay because of the arbitrarily high income compared to when the working class gets even more exploited in other industries. Being better than bad situations doesn’t mean a good situation.
Some big tech companies were colluding to keep wages stagnant by not hiring workers at other companies. Wages were lower until the collision was uncovered and companies like Facebook came around and started paying more. Colluding against workers is not treating them well.
Pay and some stock options aren’t the only ways to treat workers better. Capitalism doesn’t have to control every part of why we are nice to other people.