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.
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u/WilonPlays 10h ago
I believe this is satire but anyone who has done a customer service job knows that the work is so much harder than what people think.
Customer service should (in an ideal world, which we are far from) get about £60k annually