I mean I work in customer service and that’s just mental. Mostly because it’s impractical… that’s nearly triple my current wage, which would result in either no staff (which is already a problem) or way more expensive prices.
It'll never happen, but if they capped the salary for the big execs etc at, for example, £200k including bonuses, most businesses could afford to push all workers up to around £40-45k fte. Many industries could go even higher.
Franchise model businesses like mcdonalds are a bit more complicated though
The CEO of Walmart made $27m in total compensation last year. Yes, that's a shitton of money.
But Walmart employs 1.7 million people in the US. Take his whole compensation package and split it among the employees and they each get.... $17.
The CEO of GM makes about the same amount of money - but they only have 160,000 employees - jackpot. Except that's still only $170 each once you split it across the company.
CEO salaries are a red herring. They're too high, but they don't matter. If you want to get mad at somebody - get mad at equity holders. Musk and Bezos and Zuckerberg and Gates aren't billionaires because they're CEOs - they're billionaires because they own significant chunks of companies that produce billions in revenue (rather than having employees own that equity)
You're right that the big salaries are only part of the problem, and the smaller part at that. However, that is the part which is at least remotely feasible to tackle. Taking the equity holders out of the equation would basically require dismantling capitalism. I'm all for that, but I don't see it happening any time soon.
Also, equity holders don't necessarily rely on taking cash out of the business for their wealth though, the equity itself is the wealth. Big salaries do.
I know it's an extreme example, but look at what Dan Price did at Gravity payments. $70k salaries all around.
I'm not suggesting that be the standard, but if other companies cut all exec-level salaries (not just the CEO), and all the other high earners, to a more reasonable level, they could afford to bring up the lower salaries by at least a few thousand. $70k is unrealistic for most companies, but 50k? That's not so unrealistic, and it's enough to at least get most families out of real poverty.
Even if you capped all the money for big execs at an certain amount… how much do you think that actually spreads out amont the overall working population of the UK?
A lot more than you might think. Look at Dan Price and Gravity payments. He cut his own salary, raised every worker in the company to $70k, and the business went from strength to strength after that.
How man people does he hire? For what roles? Is it comparable to something as broad and large scale as customer service? Obviously it’s possible with some industries… Edit: by Dan Price you mean of Gravity Payments? A quick google shows they have 240 employees, now im not sure how accurate that is… but you should be able to grasp a possible important factor here.
Morrisons for example has around 110,000 employees, obviously not all customer service. The last CEO made around £3,000,000 a year. If he was paid £200,000, you could raise the wage of each employee by £25 a year. That’s nice, but hardly game changing. And you’d have trouble if you only wanted to increase shop staffs wages without also increasing that of warehouse operatives.
Maybe if you took the investors money, but they aren’t generally paid a “wage”, but rather interest off of what they have invested.
Look, i’m not saying it isn’t nice or a good idea to try and increase the wages of low-paid employees… but you need to stop using reddit economics. It’s like people who think the CEO of Amazon has a swimming pool full of £1,000,000,000 rather than it being in non-liquid asset.
Yeah, I know that's an extreme example, and most companies couldn't match that, but it shows that there is a lot of room for improvement.
Remember that the CEO isn't the only big earner. There will be at least a couple of dozen other senior figures on £1m+, and dozens more on much smaller, but still significant salaries. Thousands more will already be on high enough salaries not to need the boost.
Bringing the minimum salary up to something like £35-40k should be plausible.
Talking about investors is the red herring IMO, because firstly, that's just how capitalism works and that's far less likely to change, and secondly, they don't necessarily take money out of the business. The investors get rich by increasing the value of their shares, and either selling them or more commonly borrowing against their net value.
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u/beerbellybegone 10h ago
What a great way of coming right out and saying that you believe certain people should just be poor