This is a common sentiment of course, but I wish more people understood how totally unrelated CEO salaries are to normal staff pay and how unrelated they are to what drives this. If you want to make progress on this, you need to focus on a different part of the problem.

First, even highly exorbitant executive salaries don’t go very far when applied to the kinds of costs they’re talking about here. I think Disney has a bit more than 200k employees… but let’s say you have 200,000 employees and you pay them all 5k more… That’s a billion dollars. Bob Iger makes something like 25 or 30m a year. Sure… It’s a lot of money… But of course big companies fight this stuff. Iger’s salary is a drop in the bucket.

Second, Iger reports to shareholders. You might hate that, but it is how it works. And it’s shareholders who agree on executive compensation. So it’s a bit like he’s in a different bucket than normal people. It’s kind of like he doesn’t even work for the company. Shareholders just pay him to run the company efficiently.

Now I’m not saying any of this to get into some grand debate about the nature of this stuff and whether it’s right or wrong really… It’s just worth noting that none of these kinds of arguments really matter to any of the decision makers involved.

The thing that does matter is making a case that this makes Disney better or more money or whatever. Costco, for years, has paid their people well and had good benefits packages. In large part that’s because the CEO and company have made the case to shareholders that it actually saves them money on turnover, theft, etc.

A convincing argument here is more that the strike will cost more over time than the new package and/or that paying people better will result in better and more valuable content.