1) You cite cost of replacement - yet these companies are unable to replace their C-Suite with anyone costing less. Therefore, they can command the compensation levels they do (not to mention compensation != in pocket pay).
2) UAW employees are indeed readily replicable with little or no training on average. Offshoring is very realistic, and there is no shortage of high-school educated folks willing to work in a factory/plant for current levels of pay.
Inflation is putting a squeeze on everyone, and it just so happens your average worker is feeling it the most. It's no coincidence all these labor issues and strikes are happening right now.
They can replace their C-suite with me. The fact they don’t want to because I’m not some rich, well-connected, historical CEO does not mean they don’t have the option.
I’d do the job for just the basic pay package.
Simply stating they can hire you and they don't because you're not already well-connected clearly demonstrates you haven't an idea what these people actually do.
My point is that there are a lot of people that would make perfectly fine CEO’s skipped over because they’re not already a CEO/born into connections.
The strongest signal people use for determining whether they would be any good is whether they’re already one. Which is how people that torpedo a company get re-hired anyway.
Unlike for example, engineers, where we assume they can’t program their way out of a pack of butter even when they come in as a principal.
It's not. The moral ground has been ceded. Now it's just about "I got mine".
That's not the standard, though. The criteria is cost above replacement, and quite frankly modern executives show up extremely mediocre on that measure. Companies flip executives all the time, and it almost never results in significant changes to revenue (and when it does, it's down as often as up). In fact there's almost no measurable meritocracy among salaried executives.
The reason executive salaries got so high is simply that the class the makes up the C-suite residents (the major investors and board members) got jealous that the outgoing founders of these companies got so rich, and wanted to play in the same sandbox. It's only fair, right?
But that's exactly the moral argument UAW is making: these companies got fabulously wealthy over recent decades owing to GDP growth and stock market booms, and they should share that wealth with their employees and not just keep it for the owners. The only difference is in how you define "employee".