this post was submitted on 14 Dec 2025
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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.