The incentives sustaining managerial roles vastly exceed those compensating dangerous labor

Evidence

To goad egoistic people on to the extent that they will condescend to take charge of an army of workers and employees, you have to offer them cars, fine women, honours and unparalleled security. But to get them to ruin themselves physically and mentally and continually risk their lives by going down a mine every day, a regular supply of watery soup and meat once a week is thought to be tempting enough. A strange psychology! — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 194 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014). Piketty integrated years of income data to conclude that income inequality in the US and the UK has reached levels not seen since the nineteenth century. The top decile of US wage earners steadily increased its share of national income from 35 percent in the 1980s to over 46 percent in 2010. The bulk of this increase comes from the top 1 percent, whose share rose from 9 percent to 20 percent, about half of which went to the 0.1 percent. Piketty calculates that 60–70 percent of the top 0.1 percent of the income hierarchy is composed of managers who have succeeded in obtaining “historically unprecedented” compensation thanks to new value-maximizing incentive structures. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1755 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Although meant to empower shareholders in the face of self-maximizing managers, shareholder value policies—in particular, incentive pay—have enabled top-level managers to enjoy unprecedented degrees of wealth. Due to the shift away from salaries to stock options, executive pay has risen exponentially since the 1980s. CEO’s of the largest corporations now earn several hundred times higher incomes than the average worker (DiPrete et al., 2004; Englander and Kaufman, 2004; Bebchuk and Grinstein, 2005). These findings do not merely apply to the USA, where these compensation practices originated. Executive stock options have also been increasingly adopted by large, public corporations on the European continent and in Japan (Miyajima, 2007; Chizema, 2010). Moreover, studies show that executive compensation has continued to rise despite drops in corporate performance (Erturk et al., 2007a). This suggests that ‘the power of managers has been more significant than the power of financiers’ (Boyer, 2005, p. 40). — Natascha van der Zwan, Making Sense of Financialization, 54 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Shareholder-value incentive pay enriched managers more than shareholders themselves — Natascha van der Zwan, Making Sense of Financialization, 54; Capitalism calibrates incentives to make workers risk death for subsistence — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 194; Unquantifiable protective work is disincentivized by career reward systems — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 1980 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Capitalism calibrates incentives to make workers risk death for subsistence #corroborates (0.85) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 194
• US income inequality is dominated by top managers capturing historically unprecedented pay #corroborates (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1755
• Shareholder-value incentive pay enriched managers more than shareholders themselves #corroborates (0.82) — Natascha van der Zwan, Making Sense of Financialization, 54
• Unquantifiable protective work is disincentivized by career reward systems #corroborates (0.80) — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 1980
• Managerialist bureaucracy works as intended by weakening labour and worker autonomy #corroborates (0.78) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1493