You’re right. I’m only saying that Robert Reich’s framing “there’s money for” this not that isn’t great: it’s like saying “Oh so we have money for a new blender but not a car???”

Your framing is superior

I decided to look up some numbers and do some math.

So the CEO earns 362x the average employee at GM. Basically if they took the CEO’s pay and redidsteubuted it, they could double the pay of 362 lucky workers at GM. Or take twice as many workers as that and increase their pay by 50%.

But how many workers are there and how far will this CEO’s pay go?

GM has 167,000 employees. Collectively, their pay totals 167,000x the salary of the average employee. Very basic.

Now let’s add the CEO’s pay to that sum: we are now up to a sum of money equal to 167,362x the average salary.

And if we distribute that amongst all the employees, that’s:

167,362/167,000

Get out your calculator and you’ll see that this would fund a two-tenths of one percent raise for all employees. That’s 0.002%

The pay is very unfair. But we should be realistic that the CEO is one person and their fat salary doesn’t actually go very far in terms of worker raises.

Let’s do the math in reverse: to give all GM employees just a 2% raise would cost 9.2x the CEO’s salary. And the workers want a 40% raise over 4 years.

I hope they get it. I believe that money is there and currently going to the entire executive layer, the board, and shareholders. But when anyone tries to oversimplify and it make it all about the CEO’s salary, I cringe a bit because it really isn’t that meaningful a sum of money, unfair as it may be.

We should be looking at profit or better EBITDA and showing how easily it could be used to raise worker pay.

If you have heard the word “intersectionality” but didn’t know what it meant, this gives us a good example.

Feminists will say that women are not treated fairly overall, BUT if you’re a white woman, you might actually have it better than a black man. And if you’re an extremely wealthy white woman, you might even have it better than most men. All the factors combine.

It also works in reverse. Basically a gay black woman might not feel anything in common with Mrs. Walton, despite them both being women, and might easily see her as an oppressor.