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But you're just making shit up. Maybe my company does a good job of paying people what they're "worth," and in fact we're all going to make more money because of all the increased spending by previously undercompensated people in the rest of the country. Moreover, if you think you're making things better, then there's going to be more growth, and we'll all see more than minimal increases.
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Except that's not what happens. The debate about whether increased minimum wages lift all boats is nowhere near resolved.
The argument that increased minimum wage will come out of the pockets of shareholders, owners, and management has as much heft as the argument you raise.
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That's nonsense. No one in the market is thinking about a GC's value in the abstract. They are looking at what they'll have to pay to get a person in the door, and what the gain is relative to not hiring that person. GC'ing may or may not be easy, but the question for the employer is, what happens if I hire a less qualified person (and I'm talking about qualifications, not credentials)? You may scoff at strategy, but the reason why I get my jobs is that I have knowledge about the world and business which is valuable to my employers and which not a lot of people have.
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I don't scoff at strategy. I'm merely suggesting that sort of skill, which I don't think anyone has found terribly mentally taxing (YMMV depending on industry*) is overvalued. But that's just one of loads of skills that enjoy unwarranted premiums do to lack of information among the public. If a laymen knew the ease with which all sorts of professional jobs can be performed, the value of endless types of professionals and managers would fall radically overnight.
We profit from, I believe the term is, "informational asymmetries." A discussion that introduces intrinsic value, which is nothing but a focus on the basic value of something before the exchange value is established, would help to lower our exchange value.
A really amusing way of effecting a correction would be for someone on a big network to put out a primetime ten part series, taking ten overpaid-for jobs, and analyzing each, with whistle-blowers making admissions about what the jobs really involve. Call it, "What Your [Insert Job] Really Does."
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Why? What if the difference between what I do and what they do is worth lots to the company?
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I think the multiplier between the highest paid job and the lowest paid job would begin to revert to something like we saw in the 50s, when there was a more corporate, as opposed to deal-obsessed, economy.
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Since you can't explain how that works, it appears that's a euphemism for "making shit up."
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It's simple. Introduce an intrinsic value into the debate and let behavioral economics do the rest. Capital is always looking for cost savings, and it hates labor costs most, at all tiers. If we give it the intellectual underpinning to more aggressively cut middle to upper management and professional service wages, and the political cover of doing so to facilitate more pay to lower end workers, the arguments will get traction.
We already have a form of intrinsic valuation of labor: Minimum wage. That's a baseline value assigned to an hour of labor, regardless of what exchange value would dictate. In a socialist or communist system, one could assign all sorts of intrinsic values to different types of work. But again, we needn't do that. All we need to do is start the conversation about intrinsic valuation here and let it become an academic scaffolding for the argument that management and professionals are overpaid. Market forces would do the rest. (It would work hand in hand with tech, which is already doing this in a different manner.)
The argument that the upper middle class is actually stealing the most from the economy and keeping the poor poor, rather than the 1%, is quietly gaining traction already. We've all seen articles about that, and there's some truth to it.
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One can think that CEO pay is out of whack (and identify specific reasons for that) without thinking that everyone's pay across the whole economy is out of whack and needs to be replaced with a number that you made up.
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https://www.brookings.edu/research/t...-middle-class/
And cited within it:
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/...t-america.html
I could cite a bunch more like that.
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I think you are saying that you aspire to making shit up as a way of making a living, and I say, good luck to you.
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I think you're in the limo, humming along with the rest of us to Phil Ochs.
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* YMMV, but law, regulatory issues, etc. are a limited chessboard, involving a lot of baseline manipulation of humans. I think the ability to manipulate situations and people is at least as much if not more innate than learned. You either know how to manipulate or you don't, and while I think a bit of it can be learned, the ability to do it at the level required to be an effective strategist is in your bones, or it isn't.
