Washington Post Special Report: Breakaway Wealth

You were implying that since the CEO was running a company 10 times bigger, then he deserved 10 times the compensation. I pointed out that he's not doing 10 times the work.

 

I am quite positive that CEOs pretty much arent all that impressive. Seen it too many times. BP president during the Gulf Spill? Nuthin.
Enron president? Fool.
The parade of clowns we saw during the financial crisis? A fucking joke. None of them had a fucking clue that giving $700,000 mortgages to strawbery pickers would end in financial ruin. As Bear Stearns melted down, James Cayne spent 10 of 21 workdays out of the office, taking a helicopter from Manhattan to New Jersey on Thursday afternoons for regular golf games and skipping work to play in bridge tournaments.

On and on.
Fuck that shit about CEOs being so valuable. You got to be a Grade A moron to believe that tripe.

 

Can you take us through the logical steps from "don't pay the CEO quite so obscenely" to "the company will go out of business"?

 

YF, maybe the CEO should get off his/her 10-times-the-moxie-of-mortal-man ass to figure out how to make U.S. production more efficient, without using pittance labor overseas as the default.

 

How should we go about curbing CEO pay?

 

I think if you do some research, you'll find that CEOs do not come from some predetermined class of people.

The best CEO I ever worked for was a college dropout who rose from a Navy mechanic to an airline CEO. (Gordon Bethune of Continental Airlines.)

Hell, the worst CEO I ever worked for rose from a factory forman to CEO. (Vince Naimoli of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.)

Neither came from anything. Both succeeded because of their talents.

To dismiss CEOs as some cabal of inner circle idiots who fell into their jobs based on birthright, is to not understand how business works.

 

Who said they did??

 

Thing is, it's gotten beyond just manufacturing jobs and now includes even scientific and technical jobs. The education levels in India and China are now high enough that they can do research, development and engineering work that they couldn't do 20 years ago. And since the cost of living in India and China is still considerably less than it is here, employees can be paid much less.

There are plenty of people here with PhDs or PharmDs or MDs here in the USA who lost their jobs due to outsourcing.

 

Nike has over 30,000 employees. Less than half (14,000) are in the U.S. Plus, there's another 650,000 in Nike contracted factors around the world.

http://nyjobsource.com/nike.html

I'd rather see a lot more of those 30,000 workers in the U.S. But that would mean that people would pay $200 for a pair of sneakers made by a $10/hour worker instead of $150 for a $3/day worker.

 

Thank you.

 

Do you think Nike or Apple would be the companies they are, or would even be in business, if they manufactured here?

It's about margins. They make those profits by selling lots of shit at low margin. Take away that margin and the whole business falls apart.

And, at best, they'd be bought out by a foreign company who would move the jobs overseas.

If they don't make money, but could if run differently, they'd be ripe for a takeover.