I’m going to pick on Congresswoman Ilhan Omar again today, this time, not for her antisemitism, but because clearly she doesn’t understand how corporations work and she wants to destroy them.
Here are a few Tweets that she sent out. There are several more in her feed reiterating this idea.
Millions of workers in the U.S. are struggling just to put food on the table, while McDonald’s CEO makes $21.8 million a year. That’s just wrong.
We need to #RaisetheWage so that no one is the richest country on earth lives in poverty. ✊🏽
— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) February 12, 2019
In fact, just *10 percent* of McDonald’s workers in the U.S. make a living wage. https://t.co/kGqUS3h0zM
— Ilhan Omar (@IlhanMN) February 12, 2019
I took a look at this last Chicago Tribune article.
The boss makes how much? Illinois companies reveal CEO-to-worker pay ratio
Public companies for the first time this year must disclose how much more they pay their chief executive than their median employee, a rule born in the wake of the financial crisis and amid a social backlash against rising income inequality.
Many of Illinois’ largest companies debuted their CEO-to-worker pay ratios in recent regulatory filings, and the gaps, clearly, are massive.
Lay it on me Chicago Tribune. How bad is it?
At Northbrook-based Allstate, CEO Tom Wilson’s $18.76 million compensation last year was 230 times higher than the $81,573 earned by the insurance company’s median employee.
Allstate is one of America’s largest insurance companies. It has roughly 43,000 employees, an annual revenue of $38.5 Billion, and $112 Billion in assets.
At Deerfield-based Mondelez, former CEO Irene Rosenfeld, who stepped down in November, earned 402 times more than the snack-maker’s median worker — $17.11 million versus $42,893.
Mondelez has some 83,000 employees, $26 Billion in revenue, and $63 Billion in assets. There is a Mondelez plant in Naperville, near where I used to live. They make cereal there.
And at McDonald’s, CEO Steve Easterbrook’s $21.76 million pay package was 3,101 times the $7,017 paid to the fast-food giant’s median employee, which the company defines as a part-time hourly restaurant crew member in Poland.
McDonald’s has over 37,000 restaurants on six continents, has $22.8 Billion in revenue and $33 Billion in assets.
A good CEO is critical to company function. A bad CEO can sink a company.
A salary of $81,000 isn’t bad for an insurance agent. The responsibilities of an insurance agent, managing individual or business policies is not anywhere near that of managing a company with $112 Billion in assets.
There is a Mondelez plant in Naperville, not far from where I used to live in Aurora. They make cereal there. The people work on an assembly line and put cereal in boxes. Again, not the same level of responsibilities of managing a company with $38.5 Billion in annual revenue.
I have eaten at McDonald’s. I have never been in a McDonald’s that didn’t screw up my order the first time or had a bathroom that inspired confidence. Taking several chicken nuggets out of a warmer tray and putting them in a box, then forgetting to give me the apple juice that goes along with the Happy Meal takes a little less skill than managing the world’s largest restaurant chain.
At the most benign, this attitude reflects the belief that CEO’s are just privileged fat cats who enjoy three martini lunches while everyone else works. This is a position based on ignorance and envy.
The salary of the CEO is just like the salary of all the other workers. It is market driven. No company wants to pay a penny more than it has to, to get the quality of worker it desires.
When you have a glut of people who need a keyboard with pictures and an automatic change dispenser because asking them to count out change is too much of an intellectual challenge for them, they will depress the market wage for that position, until they are replaced by self serve kiosks.
On the other hand, when you have a small supply of people who can manage a multi-national, multi-billion dollar corporation successfully, they are worth a lot.
The first goal of this is clearly to get companies to raise their wages. The problem is the woman behind the counter isn’t worth $15 an hour to give me the wrong meal and then be shitty about fixing it. So she will be replaced with a self serve kiosk and a burger flipping robot.
The next step (you know there will be a next step) is to get companies to lower their CEO salaries. The effect will be to remove the people from the top who know how to run these kinds of companies effectively and American businesses will suffer or choose to offshore.
Really, what this is, is a war on competency. Competent people will always earn what the market determines that person is worth.
If you are a talented surgeon who can heal people that few others can, you are going to command a huge salary.
When the goverment starts attacking high salaries, either through taxes or more directly with hearings like these, what they are saying is that income shouldn’t be a function of competency and the most qualified people shouldn’t be allowed to make more than anybody else.
I wrote a post criticizing Rep. Keith Ellison about this same thing almost a year ago. It seems that Ilhan Omar adopted the same economic idiocy when she took over his Congressional seat.
The difference here is that she is one of these Freshman firebrands who the media love, and could be effective in a war on competency.
First they will come for the CEOs, then they will come for anyone who makes more than the median salary in a particular field.
Just wait until they say it is unfair that the life saving surgeon makes 50 times the salary of the orderly who changes the bed pans.
The boss always makes too much money, just ask anybody in the company. Everybody in the company is smarter than the boss. The boss is always an idiot who knows nothing about anything. On and on it goes. I was in a general meeting once when someone said she should make more than the boss because she had kids and the boss didn’t.
What she thinks is that with the CEO making all that fat cash it is stealing it from the other workers. if you took the entire salary of the McDonalds CEO and split it among the 1.9 million employees they would each get $11.45. Total, not per hour, week or month. Total. Good CEOs are worth the money. Bad ones that get paid huge coin to leave suck ass.
@thepissedoffprinter
Amen. I remember, one of the reasons Ben & Jerry’s had to sell (to Haagen Daas, IIRC) is because they decided, in the name of Social Justice, to cap the CEO’s salary at 5 times the lowest-paid employee. And then when their founder/CEO retired, they couldn’t find a qualified replacement willing to head a major market brand for only around $130k/year.
The founder of the company deciding to work for his own business for vastly less than his talent is worth is one thing. Demanding someone else do that is something else entirely. It’s no surprise they got no takers, and without strong leadership, the company faltered.
Because good CEOs really are worth the money.
The funny thing is that paying people big money for special talents isn’t controversial at all when it happens to sports stars, or Hollywood stars.
yeah, right! Why should the waterboy make minimum wage while the top-ranked quarterback makes millions? Well, let the waterboy be the QB for a game, and see what happens….
There are a few teams that seem to have taken that model. The Broncos would have welcomed the water boy by mid-season…
@pkoning
We were watching a stand-up comedian (can’t remember who off-hand) who was remarking that the various Hollywood magazines were falling over how Leonardo DiCaprio, while filming “The Revenant” lost 35 pounds during the months spent in the northern Canadian wilderness. They hyped up his dedication and how hard that must have been for him.
The joke was, Leo made $20 million for this movie, and those Hollywood magazines severely under-estimate what most of the rest of us would do for $20 million.
😀
Something that always gets missed is the notion that all jobs must have a living wage. Used to be places like McDonald’s were for high schoolers and other temporary workers, not something long term barring management level.
Just having a job isn’t a qualifier to having a career and the money that comes with it. That parts on you.
yeah, I worked at McDonald’s — when I was fifteen. I spent a lot of money and several years getting an education, so I wouldn’t have to work at that type of job.
These assholes have never read “Animal Farm.” — or if they did, they didn’t understand it. It was too deep, I guess…
What I find interesting about Animal Farm is that the one character, Boxer the horse, who was willing to keep working hard for the group, despite the inequities that were becoming more and more apparent, was a problem for the pigs at the top.
For a socialist paradise to actually work, you need to get a nation full of Boxer the horses, not a nation full of Napoleon the pigs. But, who wants to work hard, when you can get all the perks by manipulating the system?
McDonalds gets it. They advertise that they want to be “the country’s best FIRST job”.
If you think of a McDonald’s minimum wage job as a career, you’ve got a big problem. (At least if you’re not dealing with some major handicap that says this is the most you can ever do.)
I recall a statistic that someone working 15 hours a week for minimum wage in the USA is still making more than 80% of earners across the globe. (!)
So if a part time job as a Whopper Flopper puts you in the top 20% of income worldwide, what is a living wage?
It all stems from obammys class warfare- envy and “equality. Buncha bs. A buddy of mine fell for it a few years ago and I schooled him. Ever receive a paycheck from a guy who makes less than you? If you want more money, work for it is the way it used to be. Now its take from “that rich guy” and give it to some slob while keeping the gubmints “share”
If you are a talented surgeon who can heal people that few others can, you are going to command a huge salary.
And that huge salary is several orders of magnitude more than the median income of the guy who mops up the OR after the surgery is finished, or the person who restocks the surgical tool cart.
But I don’t hear Leftists demanding the janitors make more, or the surgeons make less.
Why not, you may ask?
Because someday they might need a qualified surgeon, and I doubt they’ll be willing to trust their lives to a minimum wage hack in the name of Social Justice.
Funny how that works….
Also, I’ve worked in restaurants. 25 employees per location sounds like a lot, but in reality it’s a skeleton crew; only 1/3 — tops — will be on duty at any time, and usually less, especially if the majority are part-time. And that assumes you’re only open 10 hours a day, for lunch and dinner. It goes double if your restaurant is open late, and triple if you’re running 24-hours-a-day, as many McDonald’s do.
But for giggles, let’s assume 25 employees per McDonald’s franchise for a little thought experiment.
25 x 37,000 == 925,000 employees … pretty close to a million workers.
Suppose the CEO decided to donate his entire year’s salary to increase the quality of life for the company’s lowest-paid workers. How far would that go?
The math says, just over $20 per year, or about $2 extra per month. Honestly, you’ll get more picking up discarded soda cans while walking to work (and it’s good for the environment — how’s THAT for a “Green New Deal”!).
The reality is, most McDonald’s line employees are part-time teenagers. $7,600/year doesn’t sound like much … unless you’re only working 12-16 hours per week. Then it’s totally fair … and the extra $2 per month is still a negligible pittance.
(At 40 hours per week, they’d be making triple that, or over $20k, which is still totally fair for a job that requires zero education and even less experience.)
But the Leftists want to tell us that 12-16 hour-per-week job should earn a “living wage”.
Sorry, no. That part-time job is intended for (and usually filled by) a kid still living at home, going to school during the day, the majority of whose bills and expenses are covered by parents, and who is building work experience and SOMETIMES contributing to his/her college tuition. It’s not supposed to be a “living wage” and never has been; it’s spending cash.
The UK’s NHS is moving there. No natural born British doctor wants to work for what they are offering, so the clinics and hospitals are all filling up with imports from Pakistan and India, or Eastern Europe.
And, the problem is not that a doctor trained in India cannot be a brilliant surgeon, but if they are really that good, why are they working for the NHS? Oh, and let’s add the language/accent problems. The folks in the country have a tough enough time understanding someone from London, what makes anyone think a born and bred Paki would be OK for a consultation?
It’s like Sandy Cortez and Ilhan Omar are competing to see who can be the best new DemonKKKrat at lying, insulting & being ubber condescending to the people of this country.
Even the DemonKKKrat wicked witch of the west is looking to distance herself from these 2 idjits.
@MiniMe
Leftists have been trying to out-Left each other for a while now. As disturbing as it is to see socialists out in the open pretending to respect the Constitution and America, the most disturbing part won’t be seen until 2020:
With all these extreme-Left personalities aspiring to the Presidency, the Dem nominee only has to be slightly-less-Left in comparison to be “the moderate”.
And I think the DNC knows this, and is eager for more extreme-Leftists to announce themselves. Then someone who is merely far-Left (but not extreme) can be raised up as a moderate.
A “Democrat Socialist” can be painted as “reasonable” when viewed amidst a flock of full-out Mao- and Stalin-worshiping socialists.
Then again, sh!tting on the Constitution is “reasonable” compared to tearing it into shreds, lighting them on fire, and dissolving the ashes in sulfuric acid.
I’m going to disagree regarding the Democrat’s motives in going to “war” on billionaires.
It’s a shakedown, pure and simple. It’s a money grab, with the Dems saying “nice business you got here. Shame if anything happened to it, regulation and tax wise. By the way, my $20,000 a plate fundraising dinner is next Tuesday, and here’s my kids’s number who runs my charitable foundation.
AOC & Omar act as the bad cop, so Pelosi and others can come in and act reasonable (provided that the checks cleared).
My God! Where do I start…
Who cares what someone else makes? The guy across the street makes several times my salary, but my life is not impacted in any way whatsoever.
Oh… the ratio! Who cares? This is just dumbing it down so that the ill-informed and uneducated can get riled up about nothing.
It is not fair that someone does not make as much as someone else. NO! NO!!! NOT EVEN CLOSE.
Fair is everyone playing by the same rules, Those rules include “you employer will pay you in proportion to your value to the company.” Everyone knows this rule, and a new hire that is pushing pictures on a touch screen (and still screwing up the order) does not bring anywhere near as much value to the company as the CEO.
Equal is what they are talking about. And, equal is, by definition, unfair. Yep, it is inherently unfair. Equal means that the outcomes should be equal regardless of the effort. Equal is the NFL QB that can knock a quarter out of the air from 15 yards away getting paid the same as the benchwarmer. One wins games, puts butts in the seats, and sell T-shirts. The other one practices with the QB.
OK, I do joke around, who is more important to a company? The CEO, or the guy who replaces the paper in the tiled room down the hall? Disappear the CEO for a few months, and the company will probably do OK, but disappear the janitorial staff for a day and there will be an uproar.
But, I can get another person to do the janitorial job in less than an hour, it can take years to replace a good CEO.
Oh, and one more point.
I am getting sick and tired of this woman getting all this attention for no reason other than what she wears on her head. Since when did religion become a measure of competency?