How about two hour shifts that pay a million dollars an hour? You can't change the market rate for that kind of labor by magic; employers are operating in a competitive market. You can get more money by working more hours.
Let's see; Musk is demanding that the board give him a 56B pay package.
Tesla seems to have about 130K employees. They could afford to give every employee a 400K raise and Musk still gets a fortune from the left over money.
So money doesn't seem to be very tight there, it's just that greed demands that a single person gets it all.
The shareholders would pay for Musk's pay package by having their shares diluted. It's not as if Tesla has to provide any money for that, so it's not really comparable to giving employees a raise.
Money is money. In theory they could dilute the shareholders by issuing new shares into the market and use the money to pay employees more. But this fails to identify what magic is to be used to cause them to want to do that.
Employers (and employees) generally have a pretty good idea what the market price is for a particular job. If they have to fill 100 positions and offering $25/hour causes them to get 100 qualified applicants who accept the position, they could offer $35/hour, but this is like saying that the employees could accept $15/hour when another employer is offering $25. Some explanation is required for why they would.
Tesla is a public company. If the board doesn't think Elon Musk is worth that amount of money, they don't have to pay it to him, and have the incentive not to -- the shareholders would get to keep the money instead. But maybe he is worth that amount of money; he's a one-man marketing machine and owns a major social media company that can influence the public perception of the company. That could very well be worth that amount of money to the company over a period of years -- and it isn't a single year's compensation.
So then we're back to it being a competitive market. If the company gets e.g. $60B in value from having Elon Musk, and he knows this and demands $56B, the company can either pay the market price or have a net loss of $4B relative to the alternative. And then have even less money to pay employees.
Or maybe he isn't worth that much and if the shareholders give it to him then it's costing the company money. But then that's maladaptive and the company will lose business to some other company that pays its executives less and uses the money to lower the price of their cars and gain a competitive advantage while still paying the market rate for other types of labor.
Either way it doesn't change the market price for those other types of labor, which are much easier to estimate than the value of certain unusual executives.
The compensation package was approved by the shareholders, not just the board, but then the judge didn't like the disclosures for the shareholder vote and invalidated it. Musk obviously didn't like that and is now behaving in the usual way, but whatever. He's going to put it up for another vote and the shareholders are going to approve it again or they won't.
Magic does exist. Rephrase it as regulation. Just think the minimum wage with current day inflation for 1968 is just less than $15 an hour. Deregulation and push for top 1% profits and shareholders has pushed wages down over 50%. This cuts into long term economic growth and mobility.
Reading most of your comments. You support treating works terribly by rejecting work life balance. For example, my brother in law will boast about working 100 hours in a week and in the same breath complain about having no time for himself or his family.
A strong labor force is only true when it is mentally, physically, and emotionally healthy.
> Just think the minimum wage with current day inflation for 1968 is just less than $15 an hour.
Less than 2% of people make minimum wage and the few who do wouldn't be making significantly less if it didn't exist. The primary effect of minimum wage laws is to eliminate internship opportunities. The primary effect of raising them to the point that they applied to a non-trivial percentage of workers would be to accelerate automation and offshoring.
This is why workers keep getting screwed. People ask for the wrong things.
> Reading most of your comments. You support treating works terribly by rejecting work life balance.
These are individual choices, and this is the problem with most feel good regulations. If someone is working 12 hours, maybe it's because they can't otherwise afford rent -- but then instead of doing something about high rents, you want to prohibit them from working enough hours to pay their bills.
> Deregulation and push for top 1% profits and shareholders has pushed wages down over 50%.
Younger generations are struggling because things cost more, specifically housing, medicine and education. These all have regulatory causes.
Zoning rules, licensing rules and building codes inhibit housing construction, keeping supply low and prices high.
The law promotes employer-provided health insurance, preventing employees from choosing not only where to get healthcare but even where to get insurance, since that's chosen by their employer. Then we pretend this is a market-based system even though we've disconnected choices from costs through the law, and wonder why Americans pay more for healthcare than anyone else.
The government promotes student loans. It doesn't pay for tuition, it subsidizes loan interest and prohibits the loans from being discharged in bankruptcy, allowing colleges to raise tuition into the sky without losing students. Then people have to repay that debt for decades, instead of using the money to buy a house.
"Deregulation" is a nonsense word with no specific meaning. If the state government passed a law removing local zoning restrictions, is that regulation or deregulation? It doesn't matter. What matters is that they haven't done it and now housing is unaffordable.
Yeah, it is impossible to compete against chinese / indian / kenyan slaves.
It is also hard to compete against people earning hardly enough to eat and sleep in a crowded apartment, no healthcare, even no papers. (In the US, I mean)
The problem is not regulation / deregulation. The problem is the right regulation for a few (your Musk) but wrong for the rest (your 12hrs, 16hrs, or whatever hours a day you think are fair)
> Yeah, it is impossible to compete against chinese / indian / kenyan slaves.
Not actually that hard. You build a machine that does the work of 1000 sweat shop workers, then you have a domestic job maintaining the machine, and paying one salary when it used to be 1000 causes the transportation cost to dominate over the cost of labor so now you're back to domestic manufacturing being cheaper.
But only if you don't pass dumb laws that discourage the automation and convert it into offshoring.
> It is also hard to compete against people earning hardly enough to eat and sleep in a crowded apartment, no healthcare, even no papers. (In the US, I mean)
Why is that hard? The majority of the population is already doing it. You learn to do skilled labor and then earn more money.
> The problem is the right regulation for a few (your Musk) but wrong for the rest (your 12hrs, 16hrs, or whatever hours a day you think are fair)
The problem is that people think these kinds of laws are the problem. If you can't afford rent working 8 hours and have to work 12, how is prohibiting you from working 12 going to help you make rent? It's misdirection to keep people from solving the actual problem, which is high cost of living.
