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Bezos and execs, who earn billions of dollars in compensation on the shoulders of the working class like leeches. Reduce their compensation packages and redistribute it as wages in their baseline workers.


Do the math instead of just seeing red at large numbers. Jassy earns about 29.2 M$. Lets round it to 30M$ for the sake of convenience and assume all 17 of the board members get paid the same. Amazon has about ~1.5M employees. Which means that if the entirety of their earnings were redistributed they would get a whopping ~$340 per person. An insult for a yearly bonus and certainly not enough to get people off of food stamps.


What if you instead capped executive compensation to a ratio, say 1:25 pegged against the lowest wage earner in the company?

e.g., you can only be compensated (meaning stock options inclusive) 25 times what your lowest paid employee is paid.

Would this naturally raise the floor at companies as executives want to increase their own compensation?

I remember an idea like this being floated 15 years ago or so and on the surface it seems sound, but the devil is always in the details.


The biggest challenge is to prevent companies from just far more aggressively outsourcing. E.g. you get your CEO on contract from YourBrandCEOs'r'us, where he is paid 1x the salary of the lowest paid employee.


Interesting thought, but if one is legislating a wage ratio, one can also outlaw outsourcing executive functions/positions above a certain level, no?


Then the company hires a stooge CEO that happens to have "coach", and if they don't listen to their "coach" the board fires them. Or the CEO gets handed a board seat or side consulting gig from a key investor. Etc.

You can certainly try to address this, and I'm not saying it isn't worth trying. But I do think you'd be playing whack-a-mole with creative management consultancies and accountants trying to find workarounds for a very long time, and you'd need to be prepared for that.

It also doesn't really address the problem so much - while CEO pay is often entirely out of proportion, the money flow to investors is often a far bigger issue, and would also be a workaround: Ensure the CEO has enough shares, and gets to sell enough shares, and they have a vested interest in doing the work even with lower pay. E.g. there are plenty of CEO's on low pay because their ownership is sufficient.




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