Comment by steveBK123
20 hours ago
It really feels like the COVID bubble briefly leveled the playing field a bit, and the CEO class has been foaming at the mouth rabidly mad about it ever since. "I can't believe we hired so many of you / had to pay you more / let you WFH.. ".
At least in the US, we had some of the greatest strides in terms of increases in relative wages for the middle class as we've had in a generation. And yet all everyone wants to talk about is egg prices going up so we need to vote the bums out and take a turn towards the party of the CEO class.
Not a lot of great lessons to take from that politically or economically in terms of giving people what they ask for end being punished for it.
Leveled the playing field? Strides in relative wages? See the chart here under the section labeled "Inflation Adjusted Reality" and you'll see how incorrect your statements are:
https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2025/01/0...
We still live in a country where federal minimum wage doesn't change for decades. You should also research the concept of subminimum wages and I think you'll be shocked.
If you already knew about all of the above and still think there was anything close to a leveling of the playing field, you're choosing to ignore facts.
> We still live in a country where federal minimum wage doesn't change for decades.
Very few people make minimum wage. It’s basically impossible to find a minimum wage job in my city because even the post office and fast food restaurants are paying $19/hr or more, and they advertise it on signs out front. I don’t even live in a HCOL city.
The focus on federal minimum wage has become a red herring.
I see multiple posts making your same claim and it's sad to see how many people live in a wealth bubble and haven't researched the facts at all. When I was young worked in the restaurant industry in a state that has a tipped minimum wage. The hourly pay for waiters and waitresses was and still is under $3/hr in that state. The rest of your pay is completely dependent on tips. This is the reality folks. Not the tech company that gives you free catered lunch.
This page has a table of the many states that have a shockingly low tipped minimum wage:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipped_wage
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This is putting of big 'I'm insolated in a small area of the country' as well as 'who cares this doesn't apply where I live' vibes.
The vast majority of US workers are employed in jurisdictions with minimum wages much higher than the federal limit. It's true the national law is inadequate, and there are a handful of genuinely impoverished places where that matters. But almost every metro area is at $15/hr or higher now.
Also your article is about long term trends, and has data that ends in 2022 it looks like. In point of fact real wages since the pandemic have gone up, and by a historically notable amount.
$15/hr is about $2500/mo or $30k/yr gross, which is not enough to live alone is most large cities without rent assistance. Even with a roommate sharing a 2B it cutting it close and definitely not something you can build up substantial savings with.
If wages kept up with inflation since the 70s, the minimum wage would be around $23/hr, not even accounting for increases in worker productivity.
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Great, then it should be easy to raise the Federal minimum wage.
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In Philadelphia PA wait staff in restaurants are paid less than $3 an hour. Yes they get tips. So does the wait staff in NYC that get $15 an hour. I was told this by my daughter who worked in both places. Any discrepancy with the $ is mine.
> subminimum
What a word! That’s so Newspeak-y.
I work for a mid-sized, publicly-traded tech company that has been inching towards profitability but the last couple quarterly earnings results have been disappointing (and rank-and-file bonuses were slashed to 25% of target) and the company had its first-ever round of layoffs last October. The CEO's last two years of comp were $20M and $10M which is obviously completely incongruous with the size, profitability, and stock performance of the company. It seems that there is a distortion in the market forces around executive compensation that functions in a similar way to venture capital -- investors are willing to pump outsized cash amounts into either funding rounds or executive comp since the occasional home run can result in stock returns that cover losses in other companies. It seems inefficient and certainly demoralizing, but I would prefer that solutions to the problem were driven by market forces and innovation rather than regulation or employee backlash.
> It seems inefficient and certainly demoralizing, but I would prefer that solutions to the problem were driven by market forces and innovation rather than regulation or employee backlash.
I ask this as a person who takes market forces very seriously: why?
I think it's pretty obvious at this point that these forces are not producing very good outcomes for the population (even if they are on paper efficient in the market-efficiency sense), or at least, that the public doesn't feel like they are. That's causing massive social instability that is threatening nearly the entire developed world. That instability poses a pretty high threat to the approach you're arguing for. Neither protectionist reactionaries, nor leftists, are very well aligned with free-market philosophy, and those ideologies are ascendant nearly everywhere right now. Isn't that a greater threat to free-market economics than relatively mild welfare-state and workers-rights stuff?
(Full disclosure: I am very much pro-labor and pro-regulation, so this is arguing for things I support, but even with your views it seems pretty clear to me that the status quo is dead no matter what you do. Wouldn't you rather have reforms that make the existing system work for the public than a revolution that destroys it entirely?)
> I think it's pretty obvious at this point that these forces are not producing very good outcomes for the population
Just because market failures exist, doesn’t mean a non-market approach will work better. Our markets have a lot of issues, but so do our public policies. For me, the perfect example is land use and housing regulation. With the best of intentions, government policies have made housing costs sky rocket. Meanwhile in places like Tokyo where I used to live, limited zoning laws and straightforward building codes has led to dirt cheap apartments, wonderful, walkable neighborhoods, and clean air. Where I live in California, we’re drowning in parking requirements and environmental reviews. Nothing gets built. Air is dirty, traffic is horrible, and you have to go everywhere by car.
Like you, I’m not at all opposed to government regulation or intervention. But the devil is in the details. Would a government enforced pay cap be better than the current system? I think the only honest answer is we don’t know. We need to be humble when approaching public policy, acknowledging that how we intend our policies to function is often quite different from their actual effects.
Fair question and I don't think there are easy answers to the problem. I think the actions you suggest tend to result in a market environment like Europe's where there are more regulations but businesses are generally less competitive than US businesses and wages tend to be lower than in the US.
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A company doesn't exist without employees. Their considerations should probably at some point come in to play.
Despite wide-hard capitalist beliefs, executive pay is influenced by many factors, including social perception.
So the fact that CEOs think it’s acceptable to make their salary $20M is a big factor in why their salary is $20M
> It seems inefficient and certainly demoralizing, but I would prefer that solutions to the problem were driven by market forces and innovation rather than regulation or employee backlash.
At this rate it's likely those "market forces" will come from the pitchfork, torch, etc markets.
You’re definitely right that the CEO class was furious about the social progress made by working people. But in terms of purchasing power, I think you’re wrong about working people making appreciable financial progress. Secondly, both major US parties serve the CEO class; our only choice is between covert and overt subservience. Finally, you should be aware that flippantly dismissing egg prices - or really any humans’ food security - makes you come across as privileged and out of touch.
The statistics about real wage growth are likely enough to be true.
That doesn't mean you don't have lots of people in high cost of living areas that lost purchasing power due to cost of housing or whatever. It just means that the aggregate effect is likely enough to have been an increase.
> You’re definitely right that the CEO class was furious about the social progress made by working people.
CEOs weren’t furious about “social progress”. That’s a projection of class warfare mentality.
It was, however, frustrating to see a blatantly obvious economic bubble driven by out of control government spending, which unsurprisingly has now popped. There were points in 2021 when we had junior applicants who could barely talk through the simplest interview questions but demanded senior/staff level comp because that was the going rate in the temporarily distorted market.
Many companies hired at those exaggerated rates anyway, then started cutting deeply when the market changed and they realized they were holding the bag on a lot of overpaid, under qualified hires. Other companies just sat on the sidelines and waited it out. It was the only time I remember having multiple candidates turn us down for better offers, only to message me months later begging for a job because their company overhired followed by layoffs.
> CEOs weren’t furious about “social progress”. That’s a projection of class warfare mentality.
I've never really heard a convincing argument why class warfare doesn't exist.
>Secondly, both major US parties serve the CEO class;
Every time someone says or implies that “both parties are the same” a hungry child gets called a parasite and kicked out of a free and/or reduced price school lunch program.
>> Secondly, both major US parties serve the CEO class
> Every time someone says or implies that “both parties are the same”
Those aren't the same claims.
Rather, the claim is that the party differences, to the extent that they are different, reflect differences among the wealthy political donor class who control the politicians and the policies. There are differences of opinion and approaches among the donor class.
One is the good cop and the other the bad cop. They operate by different methods but inequality continues to rise unabated.
Saw someone recently post, "Greatest regret: not committing PPP fraud."
Lest we forget that little giveaway to the boss-class.
I caught a bit of the Netflix series Beast Games (gameshow hosted by Mr. Beast) and there was one segment where 10 contestants took turns taking "their share" from a $1,000,000 pile. The "fair" thing to do is to take $100,000 each. 1 player ended up taking $600k, but many players that came after continued to do the "fair" thing and split what was left evenly. One even took $0.
I was thinking today about Conservative fascination with trans folks. They certainly aren't segregating their bathrooms at home, but have some weird hangup with doing so in public.
I think some % of the population are "low trust" (most people won't do the right thing, therefore it's OK if I do not do the right thing/I need to protect myself) and some are "high trust" (most people will do the right thing, so I should do the right thing/I'm safe).
The US has been teetering towards a "low trust" cultural and political landscape and the way to drive this even further is to take away safety nets and create general economic chaos, effectively destroying social trust. Even the whole RTO debate is really a question of high/low trust; executives have low trust in the workers they hire so they want them in office, even if it's less productive, yields higher turnover, and leads to lower morale.
The reason Taiwan and New Zealand did so well during the pandemic is perhaps partially because they are both "high trust" societies; your fellow citizens generally did the right thing and followed the rules.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-14421535/amp/YouT...
Aside: Mr. Beast claims to have lost tens of millions on the (Amazon) show Beast Games.
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Framing RTO in terms of low/high trust society behavior makes a lot of sense and is not something I've seen done before in the debate.
Yes it was a program designed to to be defrauded while backstopping wages
PPP funds had to be used on employee salaries, and not just highly paid employees.
They sure did:
> Many who participated in what prosecutors are calling the largest fraud in U.S. history — the theft of hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money intended to help those harmed by the coronavirus pandemic — couldn’t resist purchasing luxury automobiles. Also mansions, private jet flights and swanky vacations.
> They came into their riches by participating in what experts say is the theft of as much as $80 billion — or about 10 percent — of the $800 billion handed out in a Covid relief plan known as the Paycheck Protection Program, or PPP. That’s on top of the $90 billion to $400 billion believed to have been stolen from the $900 billion Covid unemployment relief program — at least half taken by international fraudsters — as NBC News reported last year. And another $80 billion potentially pilfered from a separate Covid disaster relief program.
> https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/justice-department/biggest-...
The company I worked for at the time took a large PPP loan. They never shut down, never sent anyone home, and business that year broke records.
So sure, they used it to pay employees, but they also pocketed what they would have used to pay employees.
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Yeah, and the multiple new cars that the owner bought were completely coincidental. Seeing the record of one loan forgiven, and then two weeks later a new PPP loan was obtained using the DBA name of the company, and the owners home address so it looked like a different business, and then also seeing the new lambo suv...
As much as you claim it had to be used on salaries, it mostly wasn't. That's why it's called fraud.
They probably only said that after they realised exactly what the boss-class got away with.
Regrets are always with hindsight though.
> Party of the CEO class
Sorry who crushed the railroad strike? Do you see the campaign contributions for every candidate and politician in the DNC? You think they don’t represent Wall Street? This characterization has been dead at least since Bill Clinton.
Compare the average republican sentiment to this regarding the railway strike / paid sick days: https://www.ibew.org/media-center/Articles/23Daily/2306/2306...
I don't think you can simply hand-wave the differences between your two parties. There do seem to be substantially different outcomes for the people affected by these issues.
Now instead of campaign contributions, we have the government run by actual billionaires.
Oh the elected officials took enormous quantities of contributions and spent none of their own money.
A useful term here is "labor share" and the included chart of the last ~80y: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_share
And this is why you enshrine worker rights in law, and don't leave in the hands of a "benevolent" C-Suite ...
> And yet all everyone wants to talk about is egg prices going up
This comment seems very out of touch. Grocery prices don't affect Meta engineers much, but they affect ordinary people a lot. I wouldn't even call Meta engineers "middle class". They're typically in the upper class.
I'm not saying the new administration is the solution, but it's perfectly understandable why people are hurt by inflation, unhappy about it, and wanted a change.
Real wages (inflation adjusted) for the lower 50% went up faster than they have since pre-Reagan era.
So while inflation hurts the bottom more than the top, because they spend a higher % of income, they were compensated for it.
The problem is that across the spectrum, when people got raises they went "wow I'm so good at my job and hard working and smart" and when eggs/gas prices went up they went "the president is a bad man and bad at high job".
Sort of like all the stimulus, payroll protection, unemployment benefit increases/extensions, rent/mortgage/student loan moratoriums during COVID that went on well past the point where economy was at risk, and people still ended up angrier than they did post GFC.
The amounts of money and different ways money was thrown at people by the government 2020-2021 was historically abnormal and we got more mass unrest than when huge swathes of country were losing their homes and out of a job for years during GFC.
It makes me wonder what a government can actually do that doesn't lead to backlash.
I didn't get a penny. No PPP, didn't qualify for any other protection, stimulus payments, etc. I'm not complaining, I did okay.
The perception was that the money was being thrown to business owners that instead bought multiple exotic European luxury cars.
A government could tax wealth.
You talk about minor wage increases or payroll protection as if this actually benefits the people receiving these benefits. It does on paper, sure, but governments haven't been paying for this through taxes. They've been paying for it by printing money, which devalues money (mostly held by normal people in the bottom X% of society) in favour of assets like houses and stock (mostly held by the top (100-X)% of society). This is a de facto transfer of wealth from normal people to rich and ultra-rich asset owners. Not to mention most of this money goes towards replacing money lost to asset owners anyway - if you make $X, you get fired and the government prints $X to cover that, your relative position is the same, but someone up the food chain from you has just made $X.
This kind of thing drives up asset prices. For the US specifically, house prices have gone up by over 50% since January 2020 (per every index I can find), the S&P 500 has gone up by around 125% (!), the price of gold by around 80%, etc.
Meanwhile, the SSA's National Average Wage Index has gone up 19% since 2020.
If you have a huge portfolio of stocks and REITs and gold, that's great news. If you're a normal person who maybe aspires to one day stop paying rent, this is terrible news. Of course people are upset!
> they were compensated for it.
That's a very questionable assumption.
Many people have criticized the CPI and inflation rate as an inaccurate measure of the cost of living. Housing prices are crazy in many areas. I think you're exaggerating about the affect of egg prices specifically on voter behavior. And with any average or median, there are often vastly different outcomes for different people who are not exactly average.
> when people got raises they went "wow I'm so good at my job and hard working and smart"
This feels like a straw man.
> when eggs/gas prices went up they went "the president is a bad man and bad at high job".
This also feels like a straw man, and the phrasing is quite condescending.
> people still ended up angrier than they did post GFC
Did they? After all, the 2008 Presidential election during the financial crisis was kind of a blowout in favor of the opposition party against the incumbent party. Whereas 2020 and 2024 were closer elections.
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Sociologist buddy told me few years back (during the first Trump term) they had survey data showing the anger is not economy related. When its jobs and inequality related people tend to move left more than right. More likely it was GFC/Iraq-Afg/Snowden-Assange/social media generated dysfunction/metoo/blm etc etc getting seen as some kind of attack on American identity, the kind of stuff that pushes people right.
But either way Govt is not magic. It has to react to a very complex uncontrollable ever changing reality. There will be oscillations between periods of calm and chaos.
But lots of people were losing their jobs and put out of their homes during the pandemic.
Prices rose sharply for everyone. We got roughly $2000 of individual stimulus payments over the course of ~2 years. Doesn't pay for a hell of a lot over that span.
And the increases in real wages were very uneven. If you happened to be one of the lucky ones whose wages were increased, then that's great—but many, many people's stayed the same at best. And, again, many people were fired, or quit because the alternative was putting themselves in constant physical danger plus being screamed at by people who value their own minor convenience over your life.
And as someone with a family member who was on unemployment after losing their job in the summer of 2020, if we had had to rely on it to pay the bills, regardless of how long it lasted, we would have been screwed. (And that's ignoring all the hoops they had to go through just to get and keep it.)
What could the government have done that wouldn't lead to (as much) backlash[0] from ordinary people? Well, how about
- Provide stimulus that actually keeps people afloat over a long period, rather than just tossing $2000 at them and declaring that should be enough
- Provide complete and effective PPE for everyone who has to be working during the lockdowns
- Put in place robust protections for the health and safety of both those workers (ie, protection against employers who want you to endanger yourself) and everyone else (ie, mandating masks in enclosed public spaces, mandating vaccines, strengthening requirements for good ventilation, etc)
In general, if the government were not hamstrung by having roughly half its legislators actively seeking to make government less effective to justify dismantling it and privatizing everything, it would be able to provide for its people in a more compassionate and comprehensive way.
[0] And yes; I'm aware there would be backlash against these things from right-wing science deniers. They were never a majority.
Egg prices went up because of the bird flu causing a supply chain disruption.
Egg prices are a great litmus test because there were supply chain disruptions (for different reasons!) under Joe & Orange but depending on which color hat you wear, you gave/are giving one a pass and get/got mad at the other.
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Comment though was about people choosing the fire to the frying pan. That kind of change.
Unfortunately, that's how it always is in our political duopoly. If people want a change, the only choice is to pivot back and forth between Democrats and Republicans.
I think it reminded CEOs and middle management that most of their work is not integral to the products and you could weekend at bernies most of them with few low level employees affected. Their only value tends to be self referential via class integretation (eg, they get contracts by golfing with other managers, which if there was just some contract directory they are left with little value)
However, anecdotes are how the keep justifying their salaries
It seems like everyone always underestimates stupidity and just apathy.
Oh please. No one got hired during Covid out of the sheer goodness of anyone's heart.
CEOs are sheep. They all do the same thing and run in the same direction. Your competitors are hiring, you're hiring. You can't be left behind. Your competitors are firing, you're firing. You won't be the odd man out who has to explain to the board and shareholders why you're not cleaning house when others do.
Rinse and repeat
I'm not saying they hired because they were nice, and became not nice. They over-hired and now they are going to over-fire, and they pay themselves well the whole way thru.
I am saying they are rabidly resentful of the hiring they did. You can see it in leaked comments like JPM's Dimon at a local town hall where he said something to the effect of "we hired 50k people during COVID because people aren't doing their jobs and what's why none of you can WFH anymore" lol.
The way CEOs talk about now vs then is like some Old Testament fire & brimstone stuff. Like its everyones fault that he over-hired and now they should all get back to the office or face eternal damnation.
Unfortunately American white collar workers responded to the brief period of relative power increase by pushing for remote work rather than consolidating that power or asking for better pay.
We are seeing the results now with white collar work being outsourced to countries in LATAM. If people aren’t gonna be physically collocated why pay more for someone to work from the U.S. when you can pay a fraction for someone to work in the same time zone in central and South America.
I strongly suspect we will Look back at this period similarly to how we look back at the 80s when blue collar workers voted to have their jobs outsource to China, except this time it’s white collar workers pushing to essentially make their jobs easier to outsource to the rest of the world.
Employers could always have outsourced white collar work. I remember in 2002 when "all the programmer jobs were going to India". Coming together to push for better working conditions you care about is exactly what building power looks like for any group of workers. The problem is not pushing for remote work, it's that most people do it individually so they aren't creating any kind of social structure that helps them keep some of that power when the pendulum swings back.
I think contextually what one has to remember when analysing behaviours during this time of power shift to the employee due to a global pandemic, is that while that was happening there was also a global pandemic taking place...