More to the point, the writer is in little position to do so. The CEO, however, is getting that fifteen million out of the value created by workers like the Stanleys and the Nuemanns.
So should the Stanleys get paid more? Let's say the CEO makes $15 million leading 10,000 workers. Let's just pay the CEO zero and divide up the money. We can give each worker a $1500 yearly raise. Sure, that'll change things. What CEO who has proven his value at leading the large organization would work for nothing? There's a scarcity of CEO skills and an abundance of lower skilled labor. Supply and demand are unbreakable laws of nature. If I am at a pure mountain stream, why would I pay a guy standing next to me $5 for a cup of water from that same stream? If I'm in the desert, I would have no problem paying $20 for that same cup.
Interestingly, many folks asking other people to get paid less or contribute more have no problem consuming other people's hard work for free -- specifically folks that have no problem with software piracy, for instance. Under some theories, the CEO is getting rich "off the work of others," yet hypocritically, people seem to have no problem pirating music and software -- which is effectively getting "rich" off of someone else's work.
In fact, there is quite a bit of evidence that the market for CEOs is quite the opposite -- that often CEO A sits on the board of CEOs who sit on A's board.
I won't go too far in to the other points, just to say that yes, there are quite a few people who would benefit greatly from getting to keep an extra 1500 dollars per year of the value they create.
Then again, we could pay the CEO $5m and the 10,000 workers could make an extra $1,000/year, so some other distribution proportional to the effort & ability.
$5m/year doesn't sound so awful. Are you saying that the $15m CEO is definitely 3 times better? How are you quantifying that? How do you explain the fact that some CEOs see pay rises even though their firm's revenue or share price declines over the same period?
