Minimum Wage Clock

January 4, 2024 2:27 PM

This began as a quick-and-dirty experiment to visualize the UK National Minimum Wage in real-time, inspired by Blake Fall-Conroy’s Minimum Wage Machine. Then I added the US Federal Minimum Wage, since a sizeable proportion of this blog’s readership are US-based. Did you know the US also has a Youth Minimum Wage? I didn’t. Then I got curious, and added some CEO salaries for comparison. The vast disparity is nothing new to me, but seeing it like this... It’s fucking sobering.
posted by MonsieurPEB (34 comments total)

This is a wonderful and horrifying project, MonsieurPEB. Thank you for making it.
posted by laikagogogo at 2:32 PM on January 4 [1 favorite]

Oh god, it’s truly painful to witness this aspect of reality in such stark terms. Sometimes ignorance is bliss, but I don’t know when the bliss is supposed to appear.

The scary thing is that there are those here in the US, whose salary clock is at the top of the list, ticking off a penny once in awhile, who worship the people at the lower end of the list where the dollars per second are blurred as they change so fast. These are the same people who are against tax increases on the rich because someday… someday… they’re going to be rich too.
posted by njohnson23 at 2:51 PM on January 4 [3 favorites]

Yikes.
posted by whatevernot at 2:53 PM on January 4

Wow.

I've never thought about obscene CEO salaries in terms of dollars per hour. That is staggering.

It is astounding to see that Tim Cook makes a serious annual middle-class salary every hour ... and that Sundar Pinchai makes more than twice that.

I've been wanting to do a project kind of like this, and I will probably never get around to it, so I'm extra glad somebody else did it (and did it so well).

(And also, I was not familiar with Luna or their blog, which has some interesting things, so - more cool stuff to poke around at.)

I am really glad to know about this, and I hope I can share it with lots of others who may also find it distressingly enlightening.

Thank you so much for posting this, MonsieurPEB. I have bookmarked it, and hope to share the bookmark widely.
posted by kristi at 3:11 PM on January 4 [7 favorites]

Site appears to have crashed.
posted by dobbs at 3:22 PM on January 4 [1 favorite]

This is fantastic, and would love to see it further built out to show other kinds of pay disparities by race, gender, and holy shit, the sub-minimum wage for disabled workers. Would be good to wrap some prison labor in here as well to further round out the picture.
posted by smirkette at 3:29 PM on January 4 [6 favorites]

This is a wonderful and horrifying project, MonsieurPEB. Thank you for making it.

Just a note that MonsieurPEB didn't make the project, they just posted it here. (You're not allowed to make Metafilter posts about your own work - except on the Projects subsite - mostly to cut down on spammers.) The Metafilter convention of quoting directly from the link being posted as though it's your own words does get confusing sometimes!

The site's not loading for me at the moment but it sounds interesting.
posted by trig at 3:34 PM on January 4 [2 favorites]

Slashdotted ?
posted by Ickster at 4:02 PM on January 4

Worked for me.
posted by pompomtom at 4:05 PM on January 4

This is cool, I also hope they expand it - I'd like to see it as a way of visualizing min wage vs. a middle class wage (like 50k) vs. a six figure wage, etc. rather than just the two extremes. But that isn't to say it isn't a powerful visualization as it is - thanks for sharing!
posted by coffeecat at 4:06 PM on January 4 [1 favorite]

Wish for the US they had added the tipped minimum wage but otherwise it is a great representation of the disparities that exist.
posted by AlexiaSky at 4:07 PM on January 4 [2 favorites]

Would be good to wrap some prison labor in here as well to further round out the picture.

This, and also some minimum wages from the global south, would even further highlight the obscenity of the CEOs' earnings.

Of the CEOs, why is Zuck so underpaid relative to the others? Is that because his real earnings are when the stock gains value?
posted by Dip Flash at 4:16 PM on January 4

Also sobering is that minimum wage when I was in high school in Florida 40 years ago was $3.45 an hour.
posted by seanmpuckett at 4:20 PM on January 4 [7 favorites]

This is so depressing and enraging (and well done, thank you for posting) and I am struggling to respond in way that finds a middle ground between helplessness and violent rage. At minimum I wish we could make people who are that rich at the expense of the rest of us profoundly uncomfortable; it'd be great if whenever they went out to eat they had to cope with protestors or something but they are so rich they can buy the comfort of ignoring others' suffering.
posted by an octopus IRL at 4:21 PM on January 4 [1 favorite]

My severely physically handicapped girlfriend got about 12,000 a year in disability, and we considered her lucky to have that much. She'd heard plenty of people getting way less.
posted by Jacen at 4:21 PM on January 4

Of the CEOs, why is Zuck so underpaid relative to the others? Is that because his real earnings are when the stock gains value?

Zuck takes a $1 salary and receives no stock compensation or bonuses. It's a personal decision to show he is committed to the growth of the company rather than personal gain.

His $13,033 per hour ($27 mil per year) comes from "other compensation" which is mostly private security ($25 mil) and private jets ($2 mil) as cited in the Meta Schedule 14A filing.

So he doesn't receive $27 mil in cash, the company is just required to report what is being spent on him - presumably Meta shareholders want to protect their irreplaceable founder, though honestly I feel nowadays (especially after the failure of his Metaverse) they might feel he is more replaceable...

To draw a similar picture of the top earner - Sundar Pichai's salary is $2 million per year, which works out to be around $1,000 per hour. You get to the $108,646 per hour after considering PSUs ($126 mil) and GSUs ($84 mil), from Alphabet's Schedule 14A filing.

Performance Stock Units (PSUs) are basically profit sharing.

It's like if I had some apples, which I was planning to go to my local market and sell for $100, and my friend was saying, nah he totally knows there's a better deal the next town over. I say, well, if you sell it for anything more than $100, you can get a cut of it, maybe half, and he says we have a deal. He sells the apples for $150 and we split the additional $50 profit, he takes $25 and I take $25, we're both happy.

The PSU vesting schedule is defined via performance relative to the S&P100 which is what shareholders consider the next best alternative - if they didn't invest $100 mil in Alphabet, they would invest that $100 mil in a general S&P100 index fund instead. They're investing in Alphabet because they believe Sundar can beat the S&P100, and Sundar believes it too.

The S&P100 gained 24% in 2023. The deal goes, roughly, if you can beat the S&P100, then we would have made more money in Alphabet than investing in the S&P100, so we'll give you a tiny cut of that.

In 2023 Alphabet gained about $600 bil in market cap from $1.1 trillion to $1.7 trillion, a gain of 50%, beating the 24% from the S&P100. This means the investors took home an extra $300 billion in gains compared to investing in the S&P100. This deal ended up "sharing" with Sundar about 0.04% of that gain, that is, about $126 mil. If Sundar significantly underperformed the S&P100 (below 25th percentile performance) then he gets no PSUs.

(Edit: I just realised that the $126 mil cited is the 2022 PSU award, while I'm using 2023 figures to illustrate this... anyway just treat this for illustrative purposes only)

I think, at its core, CEO compensation is just a distraction. Business owners decide what to pay their employees, it's their money after all - a restaurant decides how much to pay their chef, they can pay more to attract a better one. It's their money, they can waste it on useless chefs or CEOs, give it away or go gamble at the casino if they like.

The real issue is wages being way too low at the bottom and middle.
posted by xdvesper at 5:03 PM on January 4 [4 favorites]

My first hourly wage (1971) was $1.90 / hour, and I believe that was more than minimum wage at the time.
posted by MtDewd at 6:20 PM on January 4

In Canada The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has pushed hard on CEO salaries for years and have managed to make it part of the media landscape now.

It produces a lot of outrage at the start of the year, which is good, and I think it's been very useful because it's a huge counter balance to the vile Canadian Tax Payers Federation, an astroturf organization pushing economic libertarianism, and its insipid, scammy Tax Freedom Day which gets a lot of coverage by the mainstream press here.

It's especially galling this year in light of the severe gouging in the food industry here, with a handful of corporations controlling most of the grocery stores in Canada.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/canada-richest-ceo-average-salaries-1.7065191
posted by Phlegmco(tm) at 6:40 PM on January 4 [3 favorites]

Pairs nicely with this "U.S. National Median Rent vs. Annual Household Income, 1985-2023" graphic graphic -- TikTok, Tumbler; warning, autoplay audio (from The Beauty of Data)
posted by Iris Gambol at 7:32 PM on January 4 [5 favorites]

I think, at its core, CEO compensation is just a distraction. Business owners decide what to pay their employees, it's their money after all - a restaurant decides how much to pay their chef, they can pay more to attract a better one. It's their money, they can waste it on useless chefs or CEOs, give it away or go gamble at the casino if they like.

It is and it isn't. It is a distraction in the sense that you don't actually have to drag down the CEOs (much) to improve the lot of the rank and file by quite a lot. It does do well at getting people as angry as they should be about the situation, though.

It isn't a distraction in the sense that there's zero evidence that such outsized compensation is good for anybody but the C suite. I remember reading articles in Reader's Digest of all places back in the early middle 90s lamenting how outlandish executive compensation had already gotten, thanks to incestuous boards. If anything, it's bad for the business, as has been proven time and again when CEOs have ended up more interested in playing games with the finances to goose the numbers than the long term viability of the business. It has led to the finance department controlling many businesses rather than the department supporting the business's goals. Or said another way the financial engineering has become the motive, when it should be part of the means.
posted by wierdo at 7:32 PM on January 4 [15 favorites]

The time it takes one of those CEOs to make my daily wage is so small I wouldn't even have to worry about what to write in my 5-minutes-blocks timesheet.
posted by krisjohn at 7:36 PM on January 4

The way I heard this idea expressed is that if Bill Gates drops a $20 bill on the floor, it's not worth it for him to pick it up because the couple of seconds it would take him to do so is worth more than $20.
posted by splitpeasoup at 8:02 PM on January 4 [1 favorite]

This is brilliant! It is also interesting to think about what the money earned in a given time could buy. During the few minutes I have been watching the CEOs have ramped up enough money for a couple of nights in a high end hotel - while the minimum wage workers are approaching the point where they could afford to make a cup of their own instant coffee, any time soon.
posted by rongorongo at 1:08 AM on January 5

It isn't a distraction in the sense that there's zero evidence that such outsized compensation is good for anybody but the C suite. … It has led to the finance department controlling many businesses rather than the department supporting the business's goals. Or said another way the financial engineering has become the motive, when it should be part of the means.

I would emphasize this point especially in the context of all of the performative cost “reduction” which those CEOs engage in. Things like layoffs, pay freezes, or simply the notorious refusals to allow internal raises to match market pay rates for non-C level workers have a huge impact on the company, and rarely save as much money as the company would save by compensating executives at the level common 50 years ago.

That compensation doesn’t happen in the vacuum, it’s always at the expense of something else and for a while it’s been the ability of companies to do things like R&D well. Google is a good example: the last good products they built were around the 2008 acquisition of DoubleClick – since then they’ve had growth in existing products but nothing new has stuck, and their executives have famously been focused on promotion games rather than the future of the company.
posted by adamsc at 4:37 AM on January 5 [3 favorites]

I think, at its core, CEO compensation is just a distraction.

I don't know, I think salaries that high, and massive wealth disparities generally, warp the fabric of society (including because rich people can and do use that money to influence policy). Yes, middle and lower wages should be higher but I also think it's bad both morally and materially for some people to have or make that much money.
posted by an octopus IRL at 5:59 AM on January 5 [6 favorites]

While I agree that what matters more is how out of sync the top 5% are from the rest of us (than just a handful of CEOs), as others have pointed out, one sorta follows the other. Or at least, it's the only way I can make sense of the perennial "discourse" around the question of "Is a couple make 400k middle class?" It only makes sense if you realize that people in that bracket view themselves as middle class because they are comparing their lifestyle to that of CEOs - whereas to those of us making around or under the medium of 50k (last I checked), that's just a bonkers comparison.
posted by coffeecat at 7:47 AM on January 5

Still think the best thing to solve this problem (will no one rid us of this troublesome billionaire) is a website doxxing all individuals with a net worth north of like a billion dollars.
posted by seanmpuckett at 8:02 AM on January 5

massive wealth disparities generally, warp the fabric of society (including because rich people can and do use that money to influence policy)

Influencing policy and spending money incredibly inefficiently. Think of all the industries and vanity projects that exist solely to cater to the rich and ultrarich: megayachts, private jets, supercars, private space travel, private islands, 3rd and 4th homes, massive expanses of land owned by a single person (Ted Turner owns almost as much land as Delaware and Rhode Island combined).

These are incredibly inefficient uses of resources. The monetary and environmental costs (which are a form of tax the rest of us pay) are completely disproportionate to the meager utility produced. And yeah, yeah there are knock-on effects from people employed to do shit like build megayachts, but those engineers could be building socially beneficial goods instead of toys for billionaires.

And it's not just immoral and mind-warping for the billionaires themselves. The existence of that level of private wealth creates a striving and desire for it among others, a widespread social approval of something that should not exist.

Generational wealth transfer also perpetuates an aristocracy, which is intrinsically antithetical to democracy. And we're talking levels of wealth that not even the most profligate of prodigal sons could waste in a lifetime.
posted by jedicus at 9:03 AM on January 5 [3 favorites]

I think, at its core, CEO compensation is just a distraction.

CEOs certainly tend to argue that.

Business owners decide what to pay their employees

Except that CEOs tend to be "employed" by boards, where the power differential is entirely different. Even when board members don't want to pay extortionary salaries to CEOs, they feel a lot of pressure to do that, to "compete."

The only time that workers can typically pressure employers to pay higher salaries is when they either have a competing job offer are unionized.

They can waste it on useless chefs or CEOs, give it away or go gamble at the casino if they like.

Except they can't if they're in a competitive environment. Then then have to be more efficient with their money or risk losing business. Which is why companies that pay the most ridiculous salaries all tend to be effective monopolies.
posted by heyitsgogi at 9:49 AM on January 5 [1 favorite]

In relation to the discussion on CEOs and who holds the power, I'd like to recommend this book: The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It. I'm not super educated on politics and business, so this book shed a lot of light on things and validated my opinions towards the wealth gap.

This minimum wage clock is hauntingly beautiful and I shared it with my retail friends. I hope we can escape this oppression soon.
posted by donuy at 10:02 AM on January 5

I know a number of people -- smart people -- who think that rich people shouldn't be "punished" with higher taxes because their wealth isn't that much more than the typical middle-class worker's. Aside from being essentially innumerate, these also tend to be people who can't see the distinction between people like Gates, who see wealth in terms of power, and the rest of us who see it in terms of comfort.

I put my middle-class wage in here and I gotta say, it looks a lot more like the poorest American worker's than like any of those rich guys.
posted by klanawa at 11:57 AM on January 5 [3 favorites]

One of the problems is people see taxes as punishment instead the societal deal where people are able to have obscene incomes because of the structure that taxes pay for. Least of which the legal system that keeps torches, pitchforks, and guillotine away from their porches.
posted by Mitheral at 2:05 PM on January 5 [3 favorites]

Another great way to "tax" rich people is to unionize ;)
posted by klanawa at 4:07 PM on January 5 [2 favorites]

Another problem is people think the reason we don't have higher taxes is because some mythical part of society sees themselves as "temporary embarrassed millionaires" which isn't true. It's just another way they break our solidarity.

When I was younger and had hope I imagined "The Internet" would help us break free from things like this by allowing uncontrolled communication between the working class.

El Oh El
posted by fullerine at 12:21 AM on January 7