CEO: We need to cut costs.

Accountant: Okay. We paid you $50 million last year. We spent $10 million on your private jet flights and luxury hotel accommodations. For some reason you are being paid $1 million for this 45 minute meeting.

CEO: I see. Who's that in the hallway?

Accountant: That's Greg. He is the only thing keeping this company from falling apart. We pay him in nickels and Grubhub gift cards.

CEO: Fire Greg.

@lowqualityfacts

CEO of amazon makes 1.3 million a year thats on the low end, Apple is about 50 million. So lets go with apple, they employ 165,000 people but counting contractors and factory workers they actually employ 1.5 million people.

So if you fired the CEO of apple, one of the most highly paid CEO in history, you wouldnt even make back enough money to give every contractor and employee they hire a single penny more per year, not even a penny.

Sorry buddy but the "CEO are greedy and not worth their pay" narrative is getting old and tripe.

@freemo @lowqualityfacts
I'm not going to state my position on the overall issue here, but I think your employee and contractor total is questionable and your arithmetic is incorrect. Apple's count of employees and contractors, in full-time equivalents, is 161,000. Tim Cook's $63,209,845/year divided amongst 161,000 people would be an additional $387/year each.
1/

@brouhaha

What, the 161 figure are full time employees **only** who told you that included contractors, it doesnt. In fact anywhere that figure shows up they are clear to mention it excludes contractors.

@lowqualityfacts

@freemo @lowqualityfacts Sorry, you're correct. They have about 72,800 full-time contractors and 3300 part time. I'll update my numbers.

@brouhaha

Alright, since i dont have the source at hand lets go with those numbers...

So 164K full time employment + 73K full time contractor, and then some portion of part-time workers.. lets just fudge it and say ~10K.

so 247K total workers. Thats only 200$ a year per employee not enough to make any real difference AND the company now looses an extremely successful and important CEO. Basically a 9 cents per hour raise.

@lowqualityfacts

@freemo @lowqualityfacts Even counting all the part-time as full time, it's $266/year. For most of their employees that's a pittance, but for some people it's not trivial. Anyhow, it's a lot more than a penny (four orders of magnitude off), and as I said, I'm not arguing either way over whether the CEO is overpaid, only the numbers.
Does T.C. do a better job than a hypothetical CEO they could pay half as much? I honestly have no idea.

@freemo @lowqualityfacts
The complaints about CEO pay are usually levelled not so much at wildly successful companies, as at companies with terrible financials that cut employee pay and have layoffs and furloughs while giving executive staff large bonuses. In my opinion, a much better case can be made there.

@freemo @lowqualityfacts
The more interesting question about Apple isn't whether T.C. is overpaid, but whether low-level employees and contractors are underpaid.
I was a full-time software contractor at Apple in 1989-1990, and my hourly pay rate was about 1/2 of prevailing rate for mid-level software developers at the time, because I didn't have a good understanding of the industry pay scale at the time, and negotiated poorly.
But even that is not what I'm talking about.

@freemo @lowqualityfacts
The non-technical or less-technical contractors, including facilities and food service contractors, were paid EXTREMELY low wages, given the cost of living in Cupertino and the surrounding area. There was no inexpensive housing available within fifty miles of the Apple campus. That was 25 years ago, and the situation has only gotten worse since.

@brouhaha

Ok... what does that have to do with the topic. There is no doubt unskilled workers need to be trained so they can become skilled workers with better pay and lower the supply of unskilled workers increasing their pay as well. That has less to do with CEOs and what they are paid and everything to do with training opportunities for the lower class.

@lowqualityfacts

@freemo @lowqualityfacts I didn't say it had anything to do with CEO pay. I said it was a more interesting issue.

@brouhaha

Ahh my mistake. Then yes, I agree, an unrelated and more interesting issue for sure. One that actually needs solving.

The important part here is the blame is still not on the company, its on society for not giving those people the oppertunity to be worth more on the market.

@lowqualityfacts

@freemo @lowqualityfacts I mostly agree. I think companies bear a little of the blame.

@brouhaha

Even in cases where a company may to be blame for acting in a way that caused this result. They still arent to blame because that means the law was in error to allow it in the first place. Inless a company acted specifically against the law, in which case I'd say they are to blame.

Companies are not, and should not be thought of, as charities responsible for the welfare of their employees., at least not legally or at a societal level. I do think companies should act in consideration of its employees welfare, but only by social pressure, not by law.

@lowqualityfacts

@freemo @lowqualityfacts If they should do.it by social pressure (which does exist), but don't, that is why I say they have some of the blame. I agree that government and society bear more of it.