Originally published at: GM CEO Mary Barra can't answer if it's fair that workers make peanuts compared to her $30 million (video) | Boing Boing
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They. Just. Don’t. Get. It.
(Yeah, they do, but they don’t care. You can say, ignore, or equivocate anything you want in the defence of such egregious plundering of corporate revenues - aka ‘shareholder’s money’, but in this area they determine that the shareholder gets more value from the CEO getting $30m than the shareholders would get from the cash as dividends.)
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Disappointing, but not at all surprising.
On a better note, my US Rep is downtown Detroit right now rallying the striking UAW workers! (She really could be a great president, seriously!)
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i wish for a world where follow-up questions would include:
“do you think someone who is unable to answer a simple yes/no question should be getting paid 30 million dollars a year?”
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Being able to adroitly brazenly and clumsily avoid answering a yes/no question is what she gets paid the big bucks for. 
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Then she should be fired, she did it poorly.
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OK - I’ll edit
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My follow up would be, “Would GM’s performance have been any different if you only made $20MM a year and the $10MM went back to the stockholders?”
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In case anyone isn’t aware of where the UAW came up with their 40% pay increase demand, it’s because that’s roughly how much the average CEO (and maybe other executives, I’m not sure of the exact details) salaries have gone up since the last contract. I’m glad the UAW turned down a 20% offer. I suspect they will settle for something under 40%, but I’m glad they’re holding out. And I bring this up because it is one of the core issues that led to this strike, so it is baffling to me that GM’s CEO wouldn’t have a better answer ready to go. Maybe she thought a reporter working for another MegaCorp, Warner/Discovery, wouldn’t ask her a real question? That might not be an unreasonable explanation.
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right? i’d imagine it would draw in new investors, and raise the pie higher. or, they could invest the money in improving their ev roll out or the grid itself
my personal take of course is that executive pay should be capped at a percentage of the lowest worker’s pay
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I almost liked that post:
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Problem solved then, let’s put her on the assembly floor and find out how many cars she can put together in an hour.
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Good catch, I missed that very last word. Our area’s share of an extra $10M/year circulating through SE Michigan yearly would be a HUGE boost to our greater metro area’s economy!
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When I was a mid-level engineering manager for an HVAC manufacturer, I proposed putting all new engineering hires on the assembly line their first week, just so they would understand how the shit they design affects the people who have to build it. The idea was not well received. I still think it’s a good idea, and I’m all for making executives do it too.
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When I lived in Japan I was told an apocryphal story that employees selected for upper management at companies would have to spend time doing every job, from janitorial to mail room sorting to purchasing to mid-level management in order to learn how every part of the company works and how decisions effect every worker.
I don’t know if it was true then or is true now, but I think it is a pretty good philosophy.
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Golden shower?
Didn’t know late stage capitalism was depending on some theory of leaky water work of some uncertainty unproven assumption? /S
“No one wants to work anymore,” said all the CEOs working like ~10hrs/week from their yacht/vacation house counting as
So she made $30 mil/yr and average worker makes $30/hr translate to about $60k/yr. So do a rough calculation, she makes about 500 average workers worth. Just for argument sake, let make it 40hrs/week, so her work week would be worth about 2000hr comparing to a normal worker. For all the screaming I got to increase “productivity” from upper management, I don’t think the cost/performance here make any sense. I think physicists want to know how these CEOs break the barrier of what is physically impossible. /S
May it’s about time to stop pretending this bullshit is “meritocracy” and just call it modern slavery.
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Or not. Anything that isn’t slavery isn’t slavery.
There are lots of more appropriate options, such as “Modern Feudalism” or something like the “Gilded Age Gilded Over Again.”
Chattel slavery is a whole different level of horror that doesn’t beg comparison with anything else.
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And of course other forms of literal slavery still exist to this day too.
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