this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2025
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Y'all have no understanding of CEO pay. I won't say they're actually worth that much, though the market does, but if these megacorp CEOs gave up every penny, it wouldn't make the slightest difference.
Ran the publicly available numbers on American Airlines a couple of years ago. If the CEO got paid $1 a year, his salary would amount to a $.19/hr. raise for every employee.
Hell, let's do Starbucks.
Employees (2025): 381,000
CEO salary and stock (2024): $95,800,000
Take every penny from Brian Niccol, spread it around, call it a Christmas bonus: $251.44
Better than nothing, but hardly life changing. I'd cash the check and still be pissed off. Mash that out over hourly wages, $.13/hr. I'd fucking rage were I offered that raise, and you would too.
tl;dr: We're wasting our time enraged over CEO pay. We need to focus on raising wages, but it ain't comin' out the CEO budget.
No we're not. Even if reducing this salary won't immediately fix the problem of the average employee not making enough, it will address the problem of the CEO making 250x more than the average employee.
That's barely a problem at this point. It's a problem, but not as big as you think. There's an even bigger problem. The reason the CEO gets paid so much is to facilitate this, and also to protect the beneficiaries here.
Starbucks currently pays roughly 60 cents a quarter in dividends, so 2.40 a year. They have 1.14 billion outstanding shares, so that makes ~2.74 billion in dividends this year. That's 28 times the CEO's total comp. They also spend a billion or two on stock buybacks every year last few years. Call it 1.6 average (2023 was 2+ billion, 2024 was 1.3). Roughly speaking, that's 4.3 billion spent purely on pleasing shareholders. Use just 2 billion of that on payroll and the employees can now get a 5k annual raise, or around 2.5 dollars an hour. THAT is life changing money at the low income levels Starbucks employees have to operate at. Not "I can now buy a house" life changing, but "I can now buy groceries whenever I want" life changing.
Fuck, my numbers aren't as bad as Starbucks's own expectations from 2022:
That's almost SEVEN billion dollars a year, but I don't think they reached it quite.
You beat me to it! Fighting for the billions spent on dividends and stock buybacks is how workers will reclaim the surplus they generate for the company and win meaningful raises. That said nobody deserves compensation of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars per year, so I agree with others that cutting ceo pay is an important symbolic victory, even if it's a drop in the bucket of money flowing through the corporation.
It's my opinion that the CEO pay is bait to draw attention away from the dividends and stock buybacks.
Fight those and the shareholders will no longer vote for exorbitant CEO salaries. Unless we're talking about companies that do something else that's highly unethical and need a fall guy. To me, CEOs are almost patsies. They're the people the board can fire when the peasants start revolting, or when the company gets caught covering up a toxic chemical spill, or whatever.
Reduce their value to the shareholders, and their pay packages WILL start to go down.
You seem to think that I am approaching it as an economic problem that the CEO makes 250x more.
I am approaching it as an ethical, moral problem.
I do not care if lowering the CEOs wage will barely make a dent in the average worker's pay. I care that it will lower the CEOs compensation to be more in line with what I view is an ethical difference in wealth.
We do not agree on the degree to which this is a problem, obviously.
Ah I thought that the problem was that employees should be getting paid more.
I'm more of the opinion that elevating the floor is more important than lowering the ceiling. Sometimes the latter needs to be done, but the former should be priority.
You're presenting a false dichotomy. I never said that employees shouldn't be getting paid more. There can be more than one problem.
The problem of The CEO Is Paid 250x More Than Average Employees can be fixed by paying that CEO less. By all means, that money can go to the employees. And it should. I never said otherwise.
I'm just saying that is a tiny problem compared to the much more pressing problem of "employees aren't being paid shit".
I don't much care if the CEO is making 250x as much as the average employee if the average employee is getting paid well.
The time spent worrying about the CEO's salary is time that the shareholders can spend laughing all the way to the bank, because distracting everyone using the CEO worked. Matter of fact, that's the real job of the CEO and the reason they get paid so much. They take the heat off the people earning the real money. The fact that negative articles are being written about him instead of the board, shareholders, dividends and stock buybacks, means that he's doing his job exactly as expected, and has, in the eyes of the shareholders, earned his paycheck. The same people making billions off the backs of Starbucks employees are the ones that have decided he's worth this much to them.
I'm not saying it's right, I'm saying that focus on bigger problems first, then the small ones. The CEO's pay package will magically stop increasing every year when the shareholders aren't happy with the results anymore (dividends and massive buybacks in this instance).
If wealth inequality continues to persist at a rate of 250+:1, the workers will never be paid well. Whatever the amount, it will not be well paid. When one person makes 250x more money, that systemic inequality is going to be part of a broken system.
We are speaking past each other. Good day.
I'm just saying, the fact that you're worried about CEO pay means they've fulfilled their purpose. They're meant to be bait for us.
Imagine how good an investment it is to pay a guy 95 mill so you (the shareholders as a whole) take essentially zero heat while you get paid several billions.
There's about 500 companies in the S&P 500 and on average their CEOs earn 19 million a year. That's just under 10 billion per year on CEO salaries.
Total dividends and buybacks from these companies added up to about 1.6 trillion in 2024. This doesn't include normal (non-buyback related) stock price increases which also improve the theoretical value shareholders receive. Just the money that literally exists as actual money on the company balance sheets and is wasted on making the owners happy instead of improving working conditions, raising salaries, etc.
And as long as we make a fuss about CEO compensation packages, they will continue to rise. Ignore them and start annoying shareholders and the ridiculous CEO compensation packages start lowering again.
What really needs to happen is that stock buybacks need to become illegal, or at least highly limited. And there needs to be a way to have a cap on dividends linked to median employee salary. Then there's not only an actual incentive to increase salaries, but the CEO pay problem will take care of itself naturally. There's no point in paying them this much if the dividends you receive in return aren't as high as they used to be.
Hell, if all you want to do is reduce the inequality, link dividends directly to income inequality within the company. (lowest paid employee salary) / (highest paid employee salary, this being the CEO generally) * (some coefficient) = max % of profits that are allowed to be paid out as dividends. This is actually not as great because now there's no incentive to raise the lower end salaries, only an incentive to lower the higher end salaries.
It's injustice. Plain and simple. It's not all salary. The former CEO of my company was also drawing a ridiculously high salary for being on the board of directors for a different company. Brian Niccol famously flies to work on a private jet. Does he pay for that? Is he better than a team of people making $100k/yr? How much does he pay in taxes? He's in charge and can't pay a reasonable wage. Getting less than cost of living raise is actually tantamount to his employees getting a pay CUT. Is he getting more than 2%? What does his severance package look like?
People often say, well he has more risk being CEO. But does he? If they fired him, will he still be rich? If so, where's the risk? His employees can't eat if they get fired.
It's not salary, but if you take Jeff Bezos net worth and divide it up amongst the 1.56M Amazon employees, they would each get just shy of $152,000 and he would still be a billionaire. But those poor people are peeing in bottles and running stop signs. He didn't get that net worth with 2% raises.
I respectfully disagree that if they can't afford a 2% pay raise for their employees, maybe they need to make some cuts and maybe they should start with the CEO.
Specifically, we should cut about 12" from the top end of the CEO.
i think there's also an important symbolic gesture here. it's not only that the CEO's salary would make that much difference to employee pay, but it's also that the CEO specifically (representing the company) should make sure that the workers are well taken care of. And if their wage is too low, that means they're not well taken care of, and the CEO is not doing a good job, so they don't deserve that pay-out. It's not about the cost of the pay-out to the company, but about incentivizing the CEO to actually care about the workers.