Google says: 167,000 GM employees Mary Barra salary: $29M
Distribute that salary across the whole workforce: $174 per employee
They should really be talking about it in terms of inflation or profit margin. GM profit for 2022 was $21B
No one is saying the CEO is taking money the employees would have otherwise earned. When you divide it out like that of course its a pittance per employee.
The statement is about the relative scale of the CEO pay to one employee. I don't care about the difference applied to all employees.
An absurd parody I always imagine: John is 7ft tall. His group of 6 other other friends are only 6ft tall. Wow John is really tall! Nah, if you distribute his tallness between his friends they would only gain 2 inches! That has nothing to do with John being 12inches taller than any one of them.
If the employees really only care about that ratio, then they should accept that outcome from their strike. That's not why they are on strike, they also want to be paid more, just like the CEO.
"If c-suite really only cares about $ spent on labor, they would accept the productivity outcome of their salary proposals to employees. But they don't. They want to get more productivity, just like the workers of [insert competing corp], while not changing or even reducing comp."
The reason your comment is disingenuous is that it assumes that the best place for this money to go is into c-suite/board pockets, and for some reason assumes that workers wouldn't take the couple extra grand the CEO pay split would give them. I challenge any CEO to put it up to a (non-binding, don't shit yourself) company-wide vote.
But let's disregard the salary split. It is an incredibly simple-minded way of approaching what to do with millions/year. Are all of you, who justify these ridiculous ratios, truly unable to think of ways to spend dozens of millions of dollars to improve all employees' qualities of life? Those who spend all this money on consultants to figure out how to squeeze an extra penny of profits can't figure out how to further optimize the health of the workforce instead?
Cue the comments about "no choice, fiduciary duty". Makes me sick.
the same logic applies to CEO pay. you can either pay the CEO a lot, or you can pay everybody else an amount so slightly different that it's unnoticeable. there's value in paying a CEO a lot, or you can not pay them a lot, and not pay anybody else any more either. surely you can see how there might be value in offering a high salary for a role that can have a big impact on the company, and how simply not doing that and essentially erasing that money instead would be a bad decision?
$2 million, actually. The $29 million is total compensation; mostly stock awards.
I suppose I should be paid 167,000 more per year as a software engineer at GM because it's only 1 dollar per employee?
So interesting how that works.