Gee I’m wondering what we should all be thinking and doing about those pension funds and who that would actually serve.
Y’all get that most of us don’t have pension funds, right? They’ve been gutted long time ago. Defined benefit to defined contribution ring any bells?
But yes, let’s fight against the other plebs that have things we don’t, let’s blame pension funds and not the plethora of other issues.
I tell ya, we’re funding pensions alright but it ain’t the teachers kind.
Take a look at this, re institutional ownership: https://money.cnn.com/quote/shareholders/shareholders.html?s.... 95% of outstanding stock is owned institutionally, which is pretty normal in manufacturing. For decades, this has been a core investment sector for pensions and other institutional funds, and remains so, even if it's just to balance investments in tech, biotech/pharma, retail/CPG, financial services, the military industrial complex and transportation. Moreover, if you attend quarterly results calls, you typically end up with a few analysts from banks and at least one from some pension fund, who ask questions. We young people may not care about pensions as almost none of us will have one, but they still exist and still influence large pieces of our economy.
But look at any big corporation, take the CEO's total compensation and divide it by the number of employees. The CEO of IBM earns an obscene $16.5 million per year - but divide that by IBM's 288,300 employees and it's $60 per employee per year. Wal-mart's CEO makes $25.31 million, but it's only $12 per employee per year.
Even if we redistributed the CEO's entire salary to workers, $60/year isn't going to do much to close the gap between rich and poor.
It helps address the question: wouldn't the company perform better if we did other things with that excess money?
Of course. That's not what CEO pay/employee does, though; it trivializes the massive (over)compensation by putting it in seemingly-small terms. What we need to be analyzing CEO pay in terms of is 1) How much a person needs in order to live decently and with dignity in one's particular area, and 2) How much better than the "average" CEO any give one performs (to determine incentive pay). Certain entities, institutions, and groups have cartel-ized executive positions as a class and bid up their compensation, decoupled from real value.
Another view: $60/employee doesn't seem like a lot, but if you remove the employees making over the median, or $100k, or some other resaonable cut-off, something tells me that the lowest-paid employees would see a meaningful increase in their take-home. GGP is purposely being reductive in a way that makes rethinking the issue more silly than it actually is.
Sure.
This is exactly the same playbook as with private equity - the point is to make the shareholders richer as fast as possible, and long-term strategies do not pay out as fast while possibly introducing longer term risks.
https://www.npr.org/2022/06/01/1101505691/short-term-profits...