I doubt they are happy as much as disinterested. The economy has been heavily financialised, interest rates have been at 0% [0] and a big chunk of economic activity is government spending. Shareholders don't appear to be worried about how the company actually runs in the details. What matters is that the CEO is positioning them to tap in to the money printing and borrowing game. IE, the wages suggest workers don't really matter because they don't. Profits will come from things like being in Crypto or AI booms at the right time.
It isn't the be all and end all, but I'd rather be a shareholder in, say, a military production company with solid government contacts & contracts than one with capable workers.
[0] Thank goodness that has finally changed but there is a bit of a lag while everyone catches up to the new normal.
I was going to say this. In addition to what you say a lot of shareholders are in i for the short term. They are interested in what the share price will do in the short term.
Directors remuneration mostly decided by other directors (and just approved by shareholders who are not bothered), who tend to take the view that it is worth paying directors very highly.
Its something that has got worse, but its not new. As GK Galbraith said "The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself."
> "The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself."
More to the point, Boeing's revenue is over $16 billion. Some tens of millions are a rounding error when it's only being paid to one person, and that is the real source of the disparity. Paying one CEO $32 million is two tenths of a percent of their revenue. If they tried to pay each of their 170,000 employees even 1% of that, it wouldn't be 0.2% of their revenue, it would be >300% of their revenue and they'd be out of business.
This, in turn, is caused by the size of the companies being so large.
1% of 32 million, i.e. what you would need for the typical worker to not be making less than 1% of the CEO, is $320,000. $320,000 times 170,000 workers is $54.4 billion, i.e. more than three times total revenue (not even including costs other than labor), which would obviously bankrupt the company.
> You can still make everyone's wages better without paying millions to each person and definitely not to the CEO
The point is that the CEO's pay typically scales with the size of the company more than the media wage. Moreover, the latter is set by supply and demand in the labor market, so if you want it to go up you either need less labor or more demand for labor.
Unless you want to get into anti-immigrant and protectionist measures, the first one looks like instituting a UBI or increasing the child tax credit so people are less compelled to take bad jobs for low pay. The second one is "make the economy stronger" (e.g. reduce corruption/waste or lower taxes) and "make the market more competitive" (e.g. make companies smaller so there are more of them and they have to outbid each other for labor and customers, so labor receives the gains as either higher wages or lower prices).
There is no point at which "expect publicly traded for-profit companies to spontaneously become charitable with wages" is a viable strategy, and they do not respond to shame.
Though I don't really see the moral imperative here?
People who have a job at Boeing are already well off by global standards (and probably even by developed world standards). If you want to take from the rich and give to the poor, how about we give to the actual poor?
It isn't the be all and end all, but I'd rather be a shareholder in, say, a military production company with solid government contacts & contracts than one with capable workers.
[0] Thank goodness that has finally changed but there is a bit of a lag while everyone catches up to the new normal.