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Regarding CEOs... If the CEO does not perform, they can get canned within a year or two. However, if a general employee merely under performs, they will continue to be employeed for years. So there is extreme pressure on CEOs to make a return on the company's investment in them.
If a CEO doesn't know what they are doing, it is very VERY clear to boards, investors, etc and they get canned. Look at the Yahoo CEO for a recent example. Or the HP CEO. The boards didn't like the direction the company was going and the CEOs got canned.
Yes some of them have amazing benefits packages that total $100 million after a few years, but those CEOs work for a few MAJOR companies. Companies with thousands of employees. yes, those packages cost about as much as it would to employee 2 or 3 thousand workers annually, but what others have said is completely right, they are paid what they are paid based on the free market. If you think about it, why would a company want to give one person so much of their profit? They don't! They do because they want to find the top talent and if you look at any fortune 100 CEO's resume, you will see that they worked for several companies and moved up the ladder much faster than their peers. If that isn't an indicator of market desirability and skill, I don't know what is.
Yes, people who are doing $10/hr work should be paid $10/hr. However, is putting a car together really a $10/hr job? It certainly requires more skill than half of the entry level white collar jobs I know of. Is it worth $30/hr, I can't say that it is either. But it's the job of the unions and the corporations to negotiate their market value. If there is too much competition between salaries, they must go down. The union may fight tooth and nail not to let that happen, but if the company has to shut its doors because it can't compete, the union has lost. They don't want that to happen either.
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