Comment by vladms
4 months ago
Companies are controlled by shareholders who appoint the board who appoint the CEO. If the CEO decides to pay employees more, the board will change him because shareholder put money to get money out, not to give to employees.
Companies can give "shares" to employees, which means excess profits can be made dividends out of which employees "touch a bit".
If you would have your own company (privately own and full control) you are of course free to share the excess profit as you see fit.
Edit: and of course, share buy back avoids some taxes that you must pay, which in other schemes would have to be paid.
buyback defers tax incidence, but it doesn't avoid it, no?
also boards rarely change CEOs for paying employees well, they change CEOs if the company is not growing
labor's share of income usually falls during periods of growing output and rises otherwise (but apparently tech booms/bubbles are an exception, check the graph -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_share#/media/File:FRED_g... )
an unexpected but welcome change is that real wages of low-income workers increased too during the recent years, but the historic trend obviously shows the enormous disparity (check figure C 1979-2019)
https://www.epi.org/publication/strong-wage-growth-for-low-w...
...
and for interesting context let's not forget that during this time a lot of immigrants started to work
https://cis.org/Report/ForeignBorn-Number-and-Share-US-Popul...
and for context on the context, the size of the active population also increased - so fewer people age out of the workforce than how many started working
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/active-population...