Employee – CEO pay gap historically wide

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Proposed fixes: caps, taxation, and worker power

  • Some want hard legal limits on CEO pay relative to lowest worker pay or “Jack and Jill” averages, or very high marginal tax rates (e.g., 90%) to discourage extreme packages.
  • Pushback: high rates invite loopholes, offshoring, and personal relocation; incentives for “top talent” and high earners could be damaged.
  • Others argue the focus should be on strengthening labor: more unions, guilds, and collective action (including strikes) over issues like RTO mandates, surprise layoffs, weakened benefits, and AI deployment.
  • Skeptics note workers’ fear of losing jobs, high cost of living, health insurance tied to employment, and visa dependence all undermine strike leverage.

Power structures: technofeudalism, oligarchy, and antitrust

  • Several frame the situation as “oligarchy” or “technofeudalism,” where a small elite owns assets and rents everything to everyone else (including software/LLMs).
  • There is debate over whether tech workers are “lords” or just skilled blacksmiths still at the mercy of corporate “lords.”
  • Some call for aggressive antitrust action and breakup of large tech firms to restore competition and bargaining power.

CEO pay: value, risk, and fairness

  • One camp argues huge CEO pay can be rational if markets expect strong performance (e.g., citing a CEO hire that coincided with a large stock jump), and that compensation aligns with legal, strategic, and reputational risk.
  • Critics respond that many CEOs face little real downside—golden parachutes, rapid re‑hiring, and minimal legal consequences—while workers live paycheck to paycheck. “Risk” is seen as overstated.
  • Others question the moral and political power concentration; even if cutting CEO pay doesn’t massively raise wages, they still see high pay as corrosive.

Metrics and narratives

  • Multiple commenters challenge the headline and commonly cited ratios: the S&P 500 CEO-to-worker gap is up year over year but below a recent peak; comparing top 500 CEOs to all workers (or to all CEOs) is called misleading.
  • Wage-only comparisons exclude equity, which dominates executive compensation, but worker total compensation and tax progressivity are also contested.
  • Some see the CEO–worker ratio as emotional “agitprop”; others see it as a useful signal of extreme inequality even if it’s an imperfect statistic.

Broader structural factors

  • Suggested contributors include weak antitrust, policy choices like performance-based pay tax rules, offshoring and China trade integration, and immigration regimes (e.g., H‑1B) allegedly used to depress wages.
  • There is disagreement over which of these are primary drivers and how much any single law or court case (e.g., shareholder primacy doctrines) really explains today’s pay gaps.