Let's take Bed Bath & Beyond (BBBY) as an example because, conveniently, their CEO made ~$50M in 2013. [1] Their annual earnings report indicates that they had a net income of $1.04B that year, and their corporate profile suggests they have ~60,000 employees. [2][3] If they spent 100% of their current profits on employee salaries it would yield ~$17k/employee. (For reference, the full-time minimum wage salary in 2013 was $15,080. [4]) Even under much more reasonable conditions -- let's say that we allocate 1/4 of net income to worker salaries -- then each of their 60,000 workers would earn an additional $3800, which is just about equal to the max EITC for a family with one child in 2013. [5]
It's really not about CEOs getting paid huge amounts, it's that workers are neither represented nor included in sharing the prosperity of their labor -- and taxpayers are subsidizing the difference.
[1] http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2014/06/04/bed-...
[2] http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/bbby/financials
[3] https://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=BBBY+Profile
[4] http://www.epi.org/publication/minimum-wage-workers-poverty-...
[5] http://www.irs.gov/Individuals/2013-EITC-Income-Limits,-Maxi...
For your
> You're looking at the wrong pot of money.
I was responding to the common claim that the worker bees are poor because the suits get too much money.
Your example would be really something for Apple Computer with, what is it, $195 billion in cash?
But you also wrote:
> The basic argument I have is that they are not sharing adequately (i.e., sustainably) in the rewards for their labor.
Let's see: Suppose a company has 100,000 near minimum wage employees and the CEO got $50 million last year. So, for some arithmetic
So, distributing the CEO's salary among all the low level workers would give each worker only about $500 more a year, that is, about the same as working one week. Wouldn't even start to put the worker in the middle class.Might argue that if the CEO does his/her job well, then the company will grow, hire another 50,000, currently nearly unemployed, low wage workers and promote some of the present 100,000 workers to management positions where they start to get into the middle class.
Net, to get the poor people into the middle class will take more money than the CEOs get, and one of the best approaches is to have more and better CEOs who create more and better jobs. One example may be the large company (?) that recently announced that all its employees, many at the low level, can go to college for free.
Again, it appears that the key to getting the poor people into the middle class is not rich people but powerful people, yes, maybe powerful because they are rich; but to be successful they need to use their power, and smarts, and not just their money -- because even the rich people do not have even 1% of the needed money.
Power? Maybe. Money? No.