• kryptonianCodeMonkey@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    So, I’m here for the sentiment of calling out bloated executive pay compared to average worker… but a pie chart like this is the worst way to show this.

    A pie chart shows percentages of the whole of something, and there are many other people getting paid than just the CEO and one worker. If your pie chart just represented all of a company’s labor budget broken down to the individual, it would have both the average worker’s and the CEO’s slices be far far smaller.

    As an example, we’ll keep it as the average worker making 1/360th the pay of the CEO but the company employs 5000 people, then the average worker is making a bit under 0.02% (1/5360th) of the pie and the CEO would be a bit over 6.7% (360/5360th) of the pie. It is still massively bigger. But the CEO is not making nearly the entire labor budget alone like this pie chart makes it seem.

    Also, just being nitpicky, the pie chart is wrong even for what it was trying to show. If the CEO’s pay is 360 times the average employee then the average employee makes 1/361th of the pice chart as presented leaving the CEO the other 360/361ths. This pie chart shows a CEO making 359 times the average worker.

    • Soup@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      What? It‘s a fuckin’ pizza, my dude.

      An employee does a bunch of work and keeps the company running. Without them, the whole thing comes to a halt.

      CEOs are generally less than useless, often causing lasting damage to their own comany and to other people in the pursuit of making number go up just long enough to cash out. The only reason they get away with it is really just weak consumers and bribing their government.

      No, at the end of the day, the two people sit down to a company-bought meal. The employee gets 1/360th of the pizza and the CEO gets everything else. They can’t eat it all, but they still take it anyway. It’s not about percentages of company money as a whole, it’s about how in the fuck people can think the CEO deserves 359/360ths of a pizza for doing fuck-all but the people doing the real work need to be happy with a piece of paper identifying as a slice of three-cheese.

      • kryptonianCodeMonkey@lemmy.world
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        7 days ago

        What part of my comment do you think implied I was supporting the bloated CEO-to-worker pay ratio, that I was minimizing the impact of workers or claiming CEOs are vitally important to the company’s operations?

        • Soup@lemmy.world
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          7 days ago

          No part, which is why I didn’t say that you were. I was explaining why the image is still useful.

      • granola_bats@lemmy.world
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        6 days ago

        Using a pie chart is only useful if there is only 1 employee, if there’s 360 employees the CEO would get 180/360 and everyone else gets .5/360

        Pie chart is a deceptive way of conveying this information

        • Soup@lemmy.world
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          6 days ago

          Hey bud, you already basically said that before. Keep re-reading my comment until you understand.

        • Soup@lemmy.world
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          6 days ago

          Oh no they resign?! Get real. And the rate at which employees are punished for doing pretty much anything while the laws do not protect them is near criminal enough. In the US, being jobless is a legitimate threat on your health and safety but in many places you can be fired just for the hell of it. Even if you have a good reason, there are a myirad of ways they will attempt to supress you.

          CEOs don’t got to jail for hurting working people, they go to jail for pissing off other rich people.

  • JustTesting@lemmy.hogru.ch
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    6 days ago

    Wealth inequality > income inequality.

    Most CEOs are closer to you and me than to the billionaire class in terms of wealth/wealth growth. And a lot of CEOs are just overpaid MBAs making sure there’s a steady stream of money to the owner class, not owners of companies.
    Conversely, all billionaires could get 0 salary and would still make more in a minute than you do in a lifetime, purely by appreciation of their assets/stock. Not that we shouldn’t do it through progressive taxes, but nothing will change for the better if all you do is limit CEO pay, in terms of equality.

  • TrackenDaKracken@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    No one would miss the top net worth CEOs (I carefully avoided the word “earning”, because we all know they do nothing to earn the pay) if they disappeared right now. Except we might notice how much better everything quickly became.

  • Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de
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    6 days ago

    If they make 360 times as much as the worker, then shouldn’t the picture show 1/361th of a pizza versus the other 360/361th?

    • calcopiritus@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      That’s not the intent of the picture. The intent is to show how bug of a difference 360x is.

      If it wanted to show how much of the metaphorical pizza a CEO takes, you would need to multiply that 360 by the amount of workers.

      • Kazumara@discuss.tchncs.de
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        5 days ago

        The intent is to show how bug of a difference 360x is.

        Yeah but it doesn’t. It shows how much of a difference 359x is. It compares 1/360 with 359/360.

        • calcopiritus@lemmy.world
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          5 days ago

          That’s one use case of the pizza diagram yes.

          But if you compare the 1/360th slice of pizza to the whole pizza, you are getting a 360x comparison.

          What you are doing is compare 1/360th of pizza to 359/360 of pizza. But pizza diagrams have many viewpoints.

  • NotAnOtter@lemmus.org
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    6 days ago

    Honestly I’m surprised it’s that low.

    I know most CEO’s aren’t the megarich you here in the headlines - they “only” make $500k-$1mil.

    But the average to work out to 360x is surprisingly low to me.

    • GodlessCommie@lemmy.worldOPM
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      7 days ago

      Past time (two words): Refers to something that is overdue or should have happened already (e.g., “It’s past time to leave”) or a general time in the past.

      Pass time (verb phrase): To spend time doing something, usually to occupy yourself or make time go by faster (e.g., “I read a book to pass time”)

      • kestrel7_7@lemmy.world
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        6 days ago

        A 401(k) is a magical process wherein one person invests in the stock market, but another person retains their shareholder voting privileges.

      • whoisearth@lemmy.ca
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        7 days ago

        You’ll be down voted but it’s been my argument for years and really highlights how badly broken the system is.

        Many of us through our 401k are the shareholders demanding returns. We are all the snake eating itself.

        This is why we import cheap crap from China. It’s why we expect cheap fast food. Cost must always go down. Price must always go up.

        • wheezy@lemmy.ml
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          7 days ago

          A 401k is a target date fund that is a mix of hundreds or thousands of companies. It is hardly comparable to the stock proportions that actual investors are playing with; and does not have the power of “buy, borrow, die” that the capitalist class enjoys to avoid taxation for generations of wealth.

          A 401k a worker drops a couple hundred bucks into after each paycheck is hardly “the snake eating itself”. It’s a glorified savings account that makes stupid people feel like their interest align with those with actual capital. A 401k account is quickly becoming a means of the capitalist class gambling with your retirement savings account.

          • whoisearth@lemmy.ca
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            7 days ago

            These funds are all based off of money managers investing in set stocks with the intention for those stocks to impress with a good ROI.

            If I use the CPP as an example, decades ago all Canadians, through the CPP, bought a sizeable stake in Skype to then sell it years later for an immense profit. Do I individually have money I can put on the stock market to a sizeable amount? No.

            But if you are using an RRSP through a bank, as an example, you are leveraging the purchasing power of the bank including all the other people putting money into the same product you did.

            Economies of scale. 1 person may not make a dent but 3k people invested in the same RRSP? Yes. That RRSP may be in tech stocks or infrastructure or energy based on the product you purchased but rest assured as an individual you want “line goes up”.

            So yes, we are the snake eating the tail.

        • kestrel7_7@lemmy.world
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          7 days ago

          Many of us through our 401k are the shareholders demanding returns.

          So do you have shareholder voting privileges?

            • kestrel7_7@lemmy.world
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              6 days ago

              If you don’t have shareholder voting privileges, you are not meaningfully in control of anything in the situation. OP said:

              Many of us through our 401k are the shareholders demanding returns.

              But if you’re invested in a 401(k) you’re not a shareholder, and you’re not demanding returns at a shareholder vote as part of actual company governance. You are not owed specific fiduciary duties by the officers of the companies in question because you are not a shareholder. You’re just a person who invested in a 401(k). These words have hard and fast meanings.

              • whoisearth@lemmy.ca
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                6 days ago

                If the RRSP product I have put my money in does not match my expectations I change it, coupled with the fact that the company providing that product will have a harder time to sell said product.

                We, as consumers demand “line go up”. So yes, we are meaningfully in control unless you are an extremely passive or captive investor which I am unaware is possible. My RRSP is with Scotia they have multiple products I can choose from and I can move to any other bank at no cost. My pension is with Manulife and they have multiple products I can move my investments between at no cost.

        • Tiger666@lemmy.ca
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          7 days ago

          You need to buy a few more shares for that to be reality. Consumer shares are not controlling shares and we “poors” will never have any controlling anything when it comes to capital.

          • whoisearth@lemmy.ca
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            7 days ago

            Do you understand the volume of us “poors” when it comes to our collective purchasing power? We are indeed part of the problem.

            Edit to add I am not talking about end consumer purchasing. I’m talking about large block institutional purchasing done on our behalf.

            In Canada that can be through my RPP, my RRSP or the CPP or any other pension that may be available through my work.

            • Tiger666@lemmy.ca
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              7 days ago

              Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha. That was soooooo funny. Its almost like you think you have some sort of collective economic power in the stock market being a proletariat. The only power you have is one of class consciousness, and you seem to have none.

              • whoisearth@lemmy.ca
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                7 days ago

                With all sincerity you are a fucking moron. Educate yourself first, then we can talk.

        • WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today
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          7 days ago

          I’m just buying fucking forest land, and an empty lot to build a bare minimum shack on.

          I will live in an outhouse like shrek, and be happy about it.

    • Shanmugha@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      I’m okay with pizza without parentheses, if read “we can now have pizza on our own, just do the work needed to make it”

      …

      was okay. they’re gonna scorch the planet if left alive, right?

  • WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today
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    7 days ago

    Hmm, what is good Capitalist sounding propaganda…how about “But what you don’t see in this image, is that the pizza is actually as big as a bus, and the worker’s slice the size of a wheel”.

  • Tenebris Nox@feddit.uk
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    7 days ago

    Capitalism’s Praetorian Guard. Every company has this disparity to some extent: pay a handful more, gjve them medals and status in order to control the mass who are forced to work for a pittance.

  • SportsRulesOpinions@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    No company that consists of a single employee and a CEO has an income ratio of 360:1. I agree that the current ratio is immoral, but the meme is nonsense.