Executives salaries... take a seat before reading...

[Coligny]

Carlos Ghosn salary from Datsun... errrr... Nissan for last year was 890 milliun yens...

[url=http://www.latribune.fr/entreprises/industrie/automobile/20100623trib000523325/carlos-ghosn-un-des-plus-gros-salaires-au-japon.html#xtor=EPR-2-[L%27actu+du+jour]-20100623-[http://www.latribune.fr/entreprises/industrie/automobile/20100623trib000523325/carlos-ghosn-un-des-plus-gros-salaires-au-japon.html]]You gotta be kidding[/url]

And please don't bullshit me with the "he works so much that he deserve a plenty muney"...

He also got another salary from his CEO job at Renault... only 1,24 milion euros... or 137 milliun yens...

[Tsuru]

Appalling and excessive as it may be, let me ask a question:

If you had the opportunity, wouldn't you?

[Yokohammer]

Carlos Ghosn salary from Datsun... errrr... Nissan for last year was 890 milliun yens...

He also got another salary from his CEO job at Renault... only 1,24 milion euros... or 137 milliun yens...

I didn't know there were that many zeroes in the entire universe!

Well ... you know what they say about wealth not being a guarantee of happiness.
I have a sneaking suspicion they might be lying.

[Yokohammer]

Just saw on the news that Sony's Howard Stringer earned about 812 million JPY last year. A close second to Ghosn.

Apparently this is all coming out because the government has made it compulsory to make executive salaries above 100 million JPY public.

[FG Lurker]

I don't have any problem with it.

If just anyone could run these companies then supply and demand would push their salaries down. Clearly not just anyone can do it and that keeps salaries up. (I encourage anyone who thinks otherwise to try their hand at business. Even a small business is not as easy to run as it looks.)

Regarding money and happiness, from my own observations I would say that money is for the most part a magnifier. It can magnify happiness or misery, depending on the person and situation.

[Takechanpoo]

Regarding this problem, we should ask for Gomigirl's opinion.
While she is getting to be petit-Bourgeois recently, looks like she exploits and works her Japanese employees hard with low salary.

[IkemenTommy]

800 million is nothing compared to what Wagner in GM or the Ford CEO make and see how much they have driven their companies to the ground.

[Coligny]

I don't have any problem with it.

If just anyone could run these companies then supply and demand would push their salaries down. Clearly not just anyone can do it and that keeps salaries up.

You're assuming textbook capitalism... here we got more a situation were CEO make a sort of unbreakable monopoly keeping the prices (salaries) up

This guy is basically a glorified racequeen... Mom and pop business are awfully hard to run...
A company as big as Renault (Renault-Alpine-Nissan-Samsung-Lada-Dacia-Mack Trucks-Renault Trucks-Renault Trucks Defense-part of Volvo Trucks-and now even some scraps from Daimler Benz)... is a different beast where you don't really need to do any good decision, it's more aboot avoiding to make too many bad decision...

His only skill is bean counting, he saved Nissan... because the company was driven to the ground by its dead branches...
Trouble is... now he's all full of himself and start taking... too much decisions... And the Renault lineup is going south... (last 3 models launches were rebadged Samsungs, who where reskinned Nissan... Renault being supposed to be the flagship brand people are getting relatively pissed off)
(BTW, wait to see the new Nissan March made in indonesia or philipine in july
it's like tap water on wheels...). And to add to the fun, this guy rides in a Porsche when in Tokyo...

Compare this with Steve Jobs... 1$ salary and he really just -IS- the company...

For Tsuru... If I had the chance to take control of Renault I'd take the job on the spot... With the first change being to make everyone share the same salary proportionnal to the company benefits.

[FG Lurker]

You're assuming textbook capitalism... here we got more a situation were CEO make a sort of unbreakable monopoly keeping the prices (salaries) up

I'm assuming textbook capitalism because it is textbook capitalism. There is no conspiracy to limit the number of CEOs, there just aren't many people who actually have worked to the level of doing that sort of job. Classic supply and demand.

His only skill is bean counting, he saved Nissan... because the company was driven to the ground by its dead branches...
Trouble is... now he's all full of himself and start taking... too much decisions...

Correct, he saved Nissan. Maybe he's making bad decisions at the current time, maybe not. Results in a year or two will make that clear, and those results will determine his future with the company. Currently he is being rewarded because he has done a very good job until now.

Compare this with Steve Jobs... 1$ salary and he really just -IS- the company...

Jobs is a hands-on control-freak of a manager but he is hardly the entire company of Apple. A lot of people have worked very hard to produce Apple's hit products.

Regarding Jobs' salary, he doesn't have any need of a salary from Apple. He holds 138 million shares of Disney, a company that has paid a $0.35/share dividend the last three years. After tax that works out to over US$40mil per year. He also holds over $1 billion worth of Apple stock but Apple doesn't pay dividends at the current time. I have no doubt he holds other investments. You can bet that if he wasn't already making 8 figures/year in after-tax income that he would be drawing a very large salary from Apple.

(Edit: Jobs salary is $1 but he still gets his perks. In 1999 he was granted $90mil for a Gulfstream V (cost of the plane + enough money to cover all the taxes he would owe for it) and 10 million shares, worth at the time US$870 million. Not too shabby.)

For Tsuru... If I had the chance to take control of Renault I'd take the job on the spot... With the first change being to make everyone share the same salary proportionnal to the company benefits.

How exactly do you decide how much each employee benefits the company? For sales staff that is of course easy to calculate. For factory workers, IT staff, accounting drones, HR, etc it isn't a simple calculation. Generally the rules of supply and demand come into play -- people who are harder to replace and/or have more responsibility are more important to the company and therefore get paid more. Which brings us back to why top management get paid top salaries.

[Kuang_Grade]

I'm assuming textbook capitalism because it is textbook capitalism. There is no conspiracy to limit the number of CEOs, there just aren't many people who actually have worked to the level of doing that sort of job. Classic supply and demand.

At CEO levels, there are other external factors that prevent it from being a functioning marketplace. If there was true supply and demand issues in play, they would be treated more like skilled labor instead of rock stars. If the market worked, you'd see alot more CEO's getting fired and those with middling performance getting paid middingly salaries, but that is generally not the case. You are right that not anyone can do it but it isn't such a rare or unique a skill that only one in a million have the goods. CEO's are appointed by boards...These boards are often staffed with other CEOs or former CEO's and frequently board members are even appointed by the CEO's they are supposed to be supervising, so there are many cases where they are not necessarily neutral observers in the process. And when one guy gets paid X, then the next company CEO's in the same industry says 'Spacely Sprocket's CEO get paid X, so I'm also worth X or I"m walking' and promptly hires some compensation experts (whose whole justification for existence is to bump up the salary of the person who hired them) to justify their demands....GIven the impact on share prices that can occur when CEO's quit or get fired, boards go along with it, unless the company is already in the toilet and there isn't anything to lose. So the decision on CEO salary has alot of external forces that have ZERO to do with actual performance or actual supply/demand issues, given that boards are generally loath to replace CEOs since that gernally calls into question the board's own competency.

You are right that there is no shortage of potential CEO's since every CEO had to start out somewhere not being a CEO..it is more the case that boards go, oh this one went to harvard and worked at mckinsey, so he's clearly much better than everyone else, so we shouldn't even bother with this internal VP who actually knows the business and company but who only went to Vanderbilt and worked for AT Kerney.

[bolt_krank]

I think it's also a case of he's in a position where people who are part of the team that decide his salary want to suck up to him and don't want to piss him off.

[CrankyBastard]

In 2003, Steve Jobs traded in his options for Apple shares to the tune of about 75 million dollars.
The shares are now worth 2.5 billion dollars.
If he'd kept the options they'd be worth 12.5 billion dollars now.
I wonder how he feels about it.
I'm with Yokohammer, too many zeros to contemplate.

[Mulboyne]

...I wonder how he feels about it...

Probably quite relieved he wasn't forced to resign and prosecuted when it came to light Apple had been backdating options.

[Samurai_Jerk]

Probably quite relieved he wasn't forced to resign and prosecuted when it came to light Apple had been backdating options.

Nice one!


Anyway, I'm actually surprised how little Carlinhos makes compared to some other CEOs in the same industry.

[Coligny]

How exactly do you decide how much each employee benefits the company? For sales staff that is of course easy to calculate. For factory workers, IT staff, accounting drones, HR, etc it isn't a simple calculation. Generally the rules of supply and demand come into play -- people who are harder to replace and/or have more responsibility are more important to the company and therefore get paid more. Which brings us back to why top management get paid top salaries.

I'm assuming every employe of a company is a necessary part. Therefore everybody should have the same hourly salary. (1)

Those in only for the money would leave. Wankers would have to be fired. But in fine you'd have a team of people who cares. In the case of Renault, the ties with the nation are strong, without their Taxi (taxi de la Marne) we would have lost WWI. Without their strikes in 1936 we would not have the most of the current social system (vacation, healthcare). They put France back on wheels after WWII. All their design have brought with them some sort of social progress or revolution. Terrorist wanting to warn the governement... they kill the CEO of Renault... The last one before Goshn -Louis Schweitzer- was a former high ranking governement official... Intelligence officer for President Francois Mitterrand, he was here for mostly one reason, to act as a counterweight to the privatisation of the company, keeping the family together... The company need people who care to go forward, not bean counters... Not everything is aboot money... this and the "magic of the free market" were Reagan era lies... not reality...

For Apple... since I had to suffer with pre-jobs macintosh... And knowing how involved he is with every product i'd tend to maintain that without him the company products would be much different... He have a global vision, coherent... It's not a battle field were every little departement chief want to push the gloriest feature set to have his name in newspaper. Apple design motto revolve more around "a product is complete when there is nothing left to remove", or as Audi would say, "as little as possible, as much as necessary"



(1) was thinking aboot this at the Mc Do counter yesterday... maybe the girl behind it think she have a shitty job... But 1 she was the only real human I had contact with that day... and 2 without her as well as behing more depressed than usual i'd be also much more hungry...
(2) same goes for the trash collectors... sure they are certainly easy to replace, but think how deeply fracked we'd be without them (and it's not true in France were people think they are too valuable for these kind of jobs, so you'd think the free market would raise salaries... NOPE... we just import cheap illegal labor from somewhere else... another capitalist lie...)

One of the only job where this so called law of offer and demand seems to work seems to be the plumbers... I know a few of them... They reach the point were they don't need to ask the price when they buy a new Benz, but they also don't often have the chance to have a full night of sleep...

[FG Lurker]

I'm assuming every employe of a company is a necessary part. Therefore everybody should have the same hourly salary. (1)

Yeah, because that has worked so well in every single country where that sort of system has been tried.

I'm sure you have lots of reasons why non-capitalist systems have failed everywhere they have been tried. Try, fail. Try, fail. Try, fail. (Repeat...) Reminds me of .

[Yokohammer]

Yeah, because that has worked so well in every single country where that sort of system has been tried.

I think one of the main problems is that when people figure they're going to get paid the same no matter how hard they work, they just do the bare minimum (or less) and everything falls apart.

Not economics, just human nature. People need goals in order to give a shit.

[FG Lurker]

I think one of the main problems is that when people figure they're going to get paid the same no matter how hard they work, they just do the bare minimum (or less) and everything falls apart.

Not economics, just human nature. People need goals in order to give a shit.

It's human nature, but it's also economics. Capitalism is a system that rewards people who get shit done or make shit happen. Other systems fail to do that, and the result is as you said -- everything falls apart.

[hundefar]

I'm assuming every employe of a company is a necessary part. Therefore everybody should have the same hourly salary.

Well, sure everybody is needed. But that is not the point. In a company we need the cleaning lady as well as the CEO or the technician. But almost anyone can hold a cleaning job. It doesn't take special skills, that you have to put in a lot of hard work and time to master before you can take on the job. If you had a situation where you didn't have a free market in services, then you would have several problems. First of all there's the motivation. Fewer people would find any reason to learn these special skills and this would mean that we would all be worse off. It would also mean that people holding these special skills would be rarer and hence a black market in services would probably develop, where plumbers or others could cash in on the low supply and high demand. Such a market would be much less transparent than the one we have today. Furthermore, it would be hard for the government to know what skills were valued higher than other, since there were no free formation of prices. Comparing the skills of a cleaning lady with a plumber is hard if we don't know what people are willing to pay for their services. In order to have a society where ressources can be applied effectively we need to be able to tell what the prices are, and we can't just invent those. In the Soviet Union they had that exact same problem, and they had to look to countries with a market economy in order to get an idea of how much everything was worth and how to allocate ressources.
I think your idea is very much based on touchy-feely values and that every human being should be valued and such, which is fine, but unworkable. What you are doing is reducing a complex situation to conform to one single ethical principle, and closing your eyes to the problems it would create to do so. Socialism is a beautiful thought, but in reality it hurts people.

[Taka-Okami]

Most of these top CEOs are hard working and driven to succeed in business I grant that. FGL indicated that its about supply & demand. My thought is that there is limited opportunity to rise to the position of CEO of these big companies because there arent too many of them around. So its more like limited supply & limited demand. Most businesses are the 'mom and pop' type, where even if your the 'top' of wont be be hired to run a big multinational.

[Coligny]

It's human nature, but it's also economics. Capitalism is a system that rewards people who get shit done or make shit happen. Other systems fail to do that, and the result is as you said -- everything falls apart.

No it reward short term gain, not caring if it will trigger doom in the future...

[Taka-Okami]

No it reward short term gain, not caring if it will trigger doom in the future...

Dont worry, Capitalism is doomed, this civilization is also doomed. No 'system' has ever survived.

[FG Lurker]

No it reward short term gain, not caring if it will trigger doom in the future...

Only for shortsighted people. Who is the ultimate capitalist of our times? I'd say Warren Buffet, and he is certainly a long term investor.

Communism on the other hand rewards the laziest people. What incentive is that to build a better economy or a better anything? (Hint: None. That's why it has failed over and over.)

[FG Lurker]

Dont worry, Capitalism is doomed, this civilization is also doomed. No 'system' has ever survived.

I disagree. Our current system of trade has its roots in Roman times. It has evolved and had ups and downs but it has certainly survived. The world has been through much worse than what we are facing now. We will get through this too.

[Coligny]

I disagree. Our current system of trade has its roots in Roman times. It has evolved and had ups and downs but it has certainly survived.

Modern capitalism is born from the industrial revolution... Putting its roots as far as the Roman Empire to make it a timeless force is a little... optimistic...

Bad luck I can't recall the name of the (US based) company were everybody hold a share, work for the same salary and have a say in the company management.

[Greji]

Bad luck I can't recall the name of the (US based) company were everybody hold a share, work for the same salary and have a say in the company management.

I think those companies are all in the EU.... Greese maybe?

[TennoChinko]

At first glance, it sounds like an amazing case of austerity and self-restraint:

http://e.nikkei.com/e/fr/tnks/Nni20100623D23JF998.htm

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Shinsei Bank CEO Yashiro's Last FY Annual Salary Was Y8.5mn
TOKYO (Dow Jones)--Shinsei Bank's (8303) president and chief executive said Wednesday that his annual salary for the fiscal year ended in March was Y8.5 million ($93,400).


Masamoto Yashiro
As previously announced, President and CEO Masamoto Yashiro said he was resigning, effective Wednesday, to take responsibility for bank's poor performance over the past two years.

In May, the bank announced it had a net loss for the second consecutive year. For the last fiscal year ended March, Shinsei posted a group net loss of Y140.15 billion.

Shigeki Toma, formerly an executive with Mizuho Corporate Bank, takes over Yashiro's post.

However, it is a deliberate - and quite successful - self-serving PR campaign by Masamoto Yashiro to both make himself look good and oust the remaining 'bad' gaijin within Shinsei.

Yashiro takes great pains to appear modest and self-effacing but a peek into his old office at Citi reveals a different personality. He maintained a walk-in closet of over 100 bespoke suits and one of the duties of his team of executive assistants was to record every single outfit he wore. "Kiton grey sharkskin, white Thomas Pink shirt, yellow Hermes tie with bear pattern, black Stefano Bemer lace-ups..." Aside from vanity, another purpose was so that no client would ever see him in the same outfit twice.

What would give Yashiro a heart attack would be if the WSJ were to get its hands on documents which clearly show the transfer of tens of millions of dollars to his trust accounts in the Cayman Islands a few years earlier. Not just him, but a few other handpicked Shinsei executives as well.

Please pay your taxes, that's what is funding all this.

Yoroshiki domo

[Mike Oxlong]

Modern capitalism is born from the industrial revolution... Putting its roots as far as the Roman Empire to make it a timeless force is a little... optimistic...

Bad luck I can't recall the name of the (US based) company were everybody hold a share, work for the same salary and have a say in the company management.

Could be this one...

Isthmus Engineering

[Coligny]

Could be this one...

Isthmus Engineering

Yep, I think it iz...