AshG
Easy target
- Joined
- Nov 5, 2008
- Messages
- 8,368
- Likes
- 7,392
At McDonald's, for example, CEO Stephen Easterbrook's compensation was $21,761,052 last year, up from $15,355,746 in 2016 and $7,909,296 in 2015. According to the company's proxy statement, the median employee was a part-time restaurant crew worker in Poland who made $7,017. The ratio was 3,101 to 1. In other words, it would take that employee 3,101 years to match Easterbrook's 2017 compensation.
Last year the average S&P 500 CEO made 361 times more than the average U.S. worker. Compare that to pay ratios in Europe, where a CEO-equivalent in the U.K. makes 94 times the compensation of the average employ, and that's the high end. In Sweden, home to some large companies, the ratio is 40.
We do know that CEOs make a lot of money at publicly-held companies. Pay disclosure has been mandatory for many years. There are also multiple studies to show that corporate financial performance doesn't correlate to CEO pay. Pushing more money at the CEO, as we've learned time and again, doesn't mean the company will do better.
How Many Workers Must Live In Poverty For McDonald's CEO To Make $21.8 Million?
No, this is not a call for greater taxation or government redistribution of wealth. We can probably already think of a handful of posters who are probably going to crap all over this thread thinking its some liberal plea for redistribution of wealth. It's not. Watch them thread-crap anyway
America has thrived under several forms of capitalism during its existence. The two most prevalent forms have been shareholder capitalism and stakeholder capitalism.
Henry Ford is commonly thought of as the progenitor of stakeholder capitalism in the US. He believed that it was important to make a quality product that would encourage buyer loyalty and pair it with wages and benefits to ensure employee loyalty. Workers at Ford Automotive were paid enough to support their families and also own one of Henry Ford's cars, a luxury at the time. This was the type of economic framework our country thrived under and resulted in the expansive growth of the middle class and a clear path out of poverty for the most people.
We currently live under a predominantly shareholder system. Those who profit most from corporate earnings are not the workers, but those who had enough money to buy into partial ownership of the company. These people have little to no influence outside of their voting power on the day to day operations, yet profits are diverted from those who produce the product to increase the shareholders' return on investment. This system relies on cheap labor, cheaper production, and little regard for loyalty in either direction. It is under this system that the middle class has begun to shrink and the left has increased its cries for government involvement in the economy.
The economist describes a two-track economy with on the one hand 20 per cent of the population that is educated and enjoys good jobs and supportive social networks.
On the other hand, the remaining 80 per cent, he said, are part of the US low-wage sector, where the world of possibility has shrunk and people are burdened with debts and anxious about job security.
US has regressed to developing nation status, MIT economist warns
The question we should be asking is how to move out of shareholder capitalism and back towards stakeholder capitalism with as little government intervention as possible. Are we ok with an economic strategy that rewards those who can invest and punishes those who cannot? Is it not the most conservative thing to reward hard work and loyalty over grab-and-go proxy profiteering?
Last edited: