If you want to be dramatic: we had negative real interest rates for a long while.
Nominal interest rates were close to 0% and inflation was positive.
> Shareholders don't appear to be worried about how the company actually runs in the details.
And shareholders who are interested get vilified as activists or short sellers.
> IE, the wages suggest workers don't really matter because they don't.
The labour share of GDP has been mostly stable for the last few decades between 55 to 65%-ish See https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LABSHPUSA156NRUG
Profits have also been fairly stable as a share of GDP at around 5-10%-ish: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W273RE1A156NBEA
Just to be clear: going up or down by 5% of GDP is a lot in absolute terms, but not enough to justify hyperbole about "workers don't matter".
This, in turn, is caused by the size of the companies being so large.
You can still make everyone's wages better without paying millions to each person and definitely not to the CEO
> You can still make everyone's wages better without paying millions to each person and definitely not to the CEO
The point is that the CEO's pay typically scales with the size of the company more than the media wage. Moreover, the latter is set by supply and demand in the labor market, so if you want it to go up you either need less labor or more demand for labor.
Unless you want to get into anti-immigrant and protectionist measures, the first one looks like instituting a UBI or increasing the child tax credit so people are less compelled to take bad jobs for low pay. The second one is "make the economy stronger" (e.g. reduce corruption/waste or lower taxes) and "make the market more competitive" (e.g. make companies smaller so there are more of them and they have to outbid each other for labor and customers, so labor receives the gains as either higher wages or lower prices).
There is no point at which "expect publicly traded for-profit companies to spontaneously become charitable with wages" is a viable strategy, and they do not respond to shame.
People who have a job at Boeing are already well off by global standards (and probably even by developed world standards). If you want to take from the rich and give to the poor, how about we give to the actual poor?
Directors remuneration mostly decided by other directors (and just approved by shareholders who are not bothered), who tend to take the view that it is worth paying directors very highly.
Its something that has got worse, but its not new. As GK Galbraith said "The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself."
The board decides the CEO's salary, no?
It isn't the be all and end all, but I'd rather be a shareholder in, say, a military production company with solid government contacts & contracts than one with capable workers.
[0] Thank goodness that has finally changed but there is a bit of a lag while everyone catches up to the new normal.