it’s just not fair that he makes $4800 an hour while his store employees make $15 an hour
Well obviously if you put it like that then of course he’s going to sound like a piece of living garbage that befouls the very concept of humanity. The more genteel approach is to simply not mention such ugly things.
I’m not missing that point at all. In fact, I agree that the wage and company-ownership difference between CEO’s and frontline employees is a big problem in how large corporations opperate currently. I am saying that understanding the true details/mechanics as to why there is a visible difference in pay is how we can create effective change.
Sleep deprived labor you say? Well that’s Dunkin Donuts appeal!
by statute administrative overhead for tanf (temporary assistance for needy families) can be no larger than 15% so 85% of budgeted funds get to the recipients. meanwhile snap (supplemental nutrition assistance program) gets 92% of budgeted funds to recipients.
I’d always read from anecdotal reports that it we taste like Pork (bacon being a cured cut of pork). But it basically jives.
Possibly related (which I think was posted here once, as well):
This motherfucker… Says $12 an hour is a LIVABLE wage for a FAMILY? i laugh at this in the coldest, saddest and loathsome way imaginable. Where i live in Canada that we be a gross income of $1920 a month. Taxed at a provincial rate of 10 %, a federal rate of 15% CCP(Canada Pension Plan) at 4.95 % and EI(Employment insurance) at 1.95% we now have an approximate net income of $1306 for a 30 day period at a full time 160 hours per month. then to factor in child tax as this is a “family” discussion. On average a family size will be 2 children earning $100 each month from each child. GST will also kickback quarterly at an income of 15672 for $206 Dividing monthly into a HUGE $69. Total income each month = $1575 (and that’s only because of the government and has nothing to do with the employer or their rates).
Average rent in my city is $1121. This is the average for the cheapest possible one bedroom apartments. If were looking for what a “family” would need MINIMUM would be 2 bedroom averaging around $1400 a month. that leaves us with $175 on average to spend. Oh but wait. We forgot our utilities ! Average utilities in Calgary is $142 a month. Awesome so were left with $33 in our pocket for our personal needs. Hope you guys like pizza pops because that’s all your going to be able to afford…
TLDR; Nobody can live off that wage you greedy scum sucking piece of corporate trash.
Classism is alive and well in the USA.
Corporations such as this were created specifically to maximize profit and funnel as much of that as possible to the execs/board/share holders, while minimizing unnecessary expenses (aka paying employees and making quality products).
Paying your employees a livable wage is not optional. If you can’t do that and stay in business then you don’t have a viable business model.
Most these corporations can do it though, they just don’t want to cut into profits or the cruft at the top. They’d rather squeeze the working class as hard as possible. Sad.
I taste more like vegan bacon, or what we call “facon”.
Oh, and beer.
Facon and beer.
You could easily have stopped there.
oh sure, we’ll give you those benefits – you only have to work 40hrs a week. what? we only employ people for 30hrs a week? what a strange coincidence… ( cough aca. cough obama care. )
I’m curious what percentage from franchise fees, and marketing fees, find its way into the CEO’s paycheck. Is there a possibility where a reduction to the percentage of monthly fees on the franchise owners will allow for there to be enough revenue to cover the employees’ pay raises? One of the main hurdles, that I see, is that it will be the franchise owners that will take the brunt of the costs with increased pay.
Not that I work in corporate finance, but I do work in the corporate sector.
I’d be incredibly surprised if any CEO got a slice of franchise or other revenue as a part of their base salary or even in bonus form. That is the purvey of sales staff, as a motivator. Obviously possible, but as the OP notes the lion’s share of their compensation is in company stock and other benefits.
Company stock (or options) is generally how they tie personal performance to your compensation at the executive levels, although I did work one place where every salaried employee was granted options. (Sad that company was regarded as Evil in the tech community…)
You think a company isn’t going to pay $10 million to a CEO to maximize their profits?
that’s the problem, isn’t it? somehow the expectation of reasonable salary is completely broken. sure: it takes some amount of expertise to run a successful business. does it take 640x more expertise than a minimum wage job? does he work 640x harder?
i’ve worked both tech jobs and retail jobs: my tech jobs have always paid me vastly more than my retail jobs. yet, my retail jobs have always been vastly more labor intensive. it just does’t make any sense.
even more ridiculous, most of the time, compensation isn’t even tied to profitability. the golden parachute means, even when a ceo messes up in epic ways, they are set for multiple lifetimes.
in america, it gets even worse: because the less you make, the harder it is to get to your job, the harder it is to stay healthy, the harder it is to move to where the opportunities are.
blue-collar workers play on a whole other difficultly setting than white-collar workers do. [ edit: look at modern social mobility if you need some proof of this. ]
If you had any semblance of an understanding of economics, you might understand why this little whinefest you call an article is flawed in so many ways. First of all what a CEO of a company is paid is irrelevant in regard to what workers are paid. Secondly, with some exceptions, for the most part jobs pay what the skill set required to perform them is worth in the marketplace…serving donuts takes minimal skill, therefore, pay for that job should reflect as such. There are many skilled jobs in the workforce that pay less than $15/hr, such as many starting teachers, EMTs, dental hygentists, and sheriffs deputies. Might we say some of those professions are underpaid? Sure, but nearly doubling the wage of unskilled workers only further degrades those who took the time to learn a skill or trade or get an education, and now earn less than fast food workers.
And finally and most importantly, throwing more money at unskilled laborers does not solve the problem long term. In the long term, prices will be raised, hours cut, and less new staff hired to make up the shortcoming in the bottom line…and inevitably, artificially inflating the wages of unskilled labor will cause inflation. In other words, in the near future when prices rise, those who were catapulted to $15/hr. will be no better off when consumer goods and services go up in price, and everyone else who was not part of this across the board increase for fast food workers and makes the same wage they did before will be worse off. This won’t hurt those rich “fat cats” that the left wants to see go down so badly, because they are already rich…who this will hurt is the middle class. This will also hurt the market for needed skill jobs in the workforce. Why pay for a college degree or trade school to get a $12/hr job when you can serve donuts or flip burgers for $15? Though I would venture to guess many on this forum would like to see the big hand of government step in and regulate pay for these jobs too, that just isn’t economically feasible. Jobs should pay based on their skill set, bottom line. Maybe it is time for an inflationary adjustment to minimum wage, but $15/hr is overkill. If, say, $9-10 an hour isn’t enough, then learn a trade, go to school, or if that is beyond your means, there are plenty of lower skilled jobs out there that pay above minimum wage if you are willing to train for them…learn to drive a truck or a forklift, take a course in keyboarding and do data entry, go into sales or debt collection, those are all honest livings that don’t take a lot of education or training, just the willingness to learn them.
This.
Now, from the corporate perspective, you have to look at it from the viewpoint of rarity. How hard is it to find X skillset?
Mopping floors, cleaning toilets: not that hard.
Writing quality bug-free software? Much harder.
Structuring a company from the ground up to be competitive? Even harder (*they say)
Proponents of the market-forces model suggest that this is fair. It’s all about the rarity of a skill (resource).
People with demonstrable “Leadership Skills” shop around for the best offers, and the idea that the entire future of a company rests on one person leads those companies to offer increasingly huge compensation packages. Proponents of “Market Forces” get behind this model as the best way to conduct business, but really “Market Forces” is basically code for “What all the other big companies are doing”. It’s big-business culture.
The Googles and Apples of the world get crap for driving up salaries for engineers, but it does not hold a candle to the perverse game that is the “Executive Talent Search”.
My feelings are mixed on this phenomenon, though. I have a skillset that is uncommon, and so I’ve benefitted from this model to a certain extent. On the other hand, if I haven’t mentioned it, the industry that has grown around the “Executive talent search” has grown ever more perverse.
Has anybody noticed at all that the discussion around gender equality in the workforce has mostly revolved around executive positions?
i would say, lower taxes at the low end, and substantially higher taxes at the higher end. and remove as many tax deduction ( primary home, okay. multiple home deduction? silly ) as possible.
the capital gains taps out at 20%, and income taps out at 39% for about 400k. that’s all much too low. too early – something needs to equalize the piiketty effect.
I’ve heard Germany is a great model that we should follow, but I can’t seem to find hard documentation just searching around. I gather it relates to their attitudes towards free education, trade schools not being stigmatized, etc. leaving the minimum wage jobs for a much smaller segment of society.
one thing i see ( locally, at any rate ) that’s a huge driver for higher pay is higher rents.
but, then that higher pay does trickle straight up.
given the current economic situation, i do believe people need higher wages, but it’s not clear to me that it’s the best long term solution.
because nothing does seem to stop the property holders from raising rents to the highest level the market can bear.
rent control, single payer healthcare, significant investment in public transportation, those sorts of things might help more. [ edit: student loan forgiveness, etc. ]
“Where I live, in Canada”.That says it all, then you go on to tell us about all the taxes you pay. In the U.S., taxes are much lower.After the standard deduction and personal exemption are taken out, the first $7K or so is tax-free federally. At $8/hr that is nearly half your annual income. The rest is taxed minimally until you pass 30k or so. Then you pay around 3.5% for social security/SSI, and taxes vary by state, some have no income tax. My home state is one of the highest and you still pay nothing on nearly the first 10K, and qualify for a host of low-income earner’s credits up to 28k a year. So your effective tax rate is minimal at minimum wage, throwing that argument out the window. Bottom line is you have a family, the opportunity is there to earn more with some simple training, or State-subsidized schooling, which you qualify for if you are below the poverty line. Nearly doubling the wage for unskilled work is not the answer. The market will adjust itself in the form of higher prices, less work hours, and fewer available jobs, and these people will be no better off. Comparing CEO pay to workers is just silly. You can’t control what they are paid unless everyone living decides to boycott almost every big business in the country, which won’t happen. All you can do is better yourself through education or training and get a better job. Fast food jobs should be no more than a stepping stone to earn some pocket money when you are young. If you are trying to earn your livelihood this way, you are not trying hard enough. Life is a challenge, we should aspire to better ourselves, not be wards of the government, relying on them to step in and demand we are paid more for unskilled work.
