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once upon a time, before unilever bought them out, establishing and maintaining a rational proportion between worker wages and ceo-level salaries wage was an important aspect of how ben and jerry's ran it's business.
when unilever entered the picture, there was a split between the two founders, with ben leaving the game. the main issue was the abandonment of this politics of wages/salaries.
i mention this to indicate what should be self-evident: these relations are choices. the lack of a relation between executive compensation and workers wages is also a choice. it is a political choice--and eminently political choice---based on alot of factors, really--but one of which goes back to a sub-topic raised earlier, which is the conception/imagined mechanism whereby value is created. before unilevel, ben and jerry's operated under the assumption that it's workers created value because they made the product. the product was sent out into the market, the product was purchased blah blah blah. unilever's view is apparently otherwise, that capital creates value. in the first conception, it is the object produced that is the centerpiece of the understanding--the the latter it is the movement of capital.
this is an instructive little story and i'm glad i told it.
there's a ton of information on the web about this, debris from the wider controversy at/around ben and jerry's concerning the buyout. searches find it.
addendum: if you think about it, in the shift from the initial to the present arrangement, working people go from being present to disappearing.
so it is in this debate.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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