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If shareholders were indeed "rich dudes", then why do you have a problem with rich dudes paying too much money to other rich dudes for being executives? With that logic, "normal" folk don't even enter into the equation, do they? Institutional investor is not a euphemism for "rich dudes". Institutional investors are overwhelmingly things like pension funds and insurance companies, whose clients are people like you and me. -- Even more so in Europe, where stock ownership by individuals and private equity makes up an even smaller proportion than it does in the U.S., and top-level executives in large corporates still make a lot of money. If a pension fund wanted to, it could represent the interests of pension fund holders in general meetings, although I will grant to you that they don't usually live up to that duty. But that doesn't mean that such a thing as shareholder activism doesn't exist. We are seeing increasing activity by agencies who collect proxies from institutional investors to push for change around certain issues at shareholders' meetings. ...even with all of that discussion, I really don't see why employee activitsm is needed over shareholder activism to rectify the situation, if indeed there were something wrong with the situation. Furthermore, I don't believe that there is anything wrong with the situation: A C-Suite executive at an S&P 500 corporate or a EuroStoxx 500 corporation should, in my opinion, make more money than a football player or Hollywood star, because what they do is actually more valuable. -- For some reason, the general public never complains about the level of compensation of the latter, even when, as is the case in Europe, it is the taxpayer who pays for this through mandatory contributions to public broadcasting (which, in turn, get used to pay for broadcast rights to sports events and so forth). |