• Cyborganism@lemmy.ca
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      7 months ago

      He can give himself a 25% raise worth several tens of millions of dollars which he made thanks to the hard work of the employees at WB, but these employees get next to nothing during a time where every basic needs like food and shelter are increasingly expensive.

      A big part of that money should go to the employees.

    • wander1236
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      7 months ago

      I understood it to be mocking the headline’s passive tone. The CEO is the one with much of the power to increase their own pay in a company, but the article is talking about it like some unknown magical entity just gifted this guy with $50 million.

      And I think it’s also combined with the general sentiment that anyone making that much is stealing from workers.

      • tearsintherain@leminal.space
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        7 months ago

        The only issue with that is there is a corporate board and shareholders (only non-binding votes to show approval or displeasure i read in the nyt piece), but cant say you’re not wrong either in terms of the board. And maybe something to do with this:

        Pay packages like these — when entertainment companies have been walloped by the shift to streaming from traditional television — played a major role in the union strikes. “They plead poverty, that they’re losing money left and right when giving hundreds of millions of dollars to their C.E.O.s,” Fran Drescher, the president of the actors’ union, said at July rally. “It is disgusting.”

        Most of the big media companies slashed costs in 2023, laying off thousands of people and announcing plans to make fewer movies and television shows. But Mr. Zaslav and his lieutenants have been particularly aggressive, even shelving nearly finished content like “Batgirl” and “Coyote vs. Acme.” https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/19/business/media/david-zaslav-pay-package.html

    • OldWoodFrame@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      From a communist lens, the money to give the CEO a raise is the value of labor that workers provided, taken by the CEO instead of shared among the workers who provided it.

      So (from that lens) the money going to the CEO is being stolen from the workers, the money is the car in the analogy. But the headline is framing the situation as “X got this thing worth a lot” without considering where the value came from.

      Workers whose labor value have been stolen are like a person whose car was stolen, waking up to a positively-framed article about someone else receiving the stolen goods.

      • hash0772
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        7 months ago

        No, it’s most likely about the layoffs and pay cuts the companies do to their employees to give themselves a raise.

      • hangonasecond@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        No, he is the CEO of the company “Warner Bros. Discovery” from a quick google. I think it’s just unfamiliar to see someone’s pay increase retroactively, since it literally doesn’t happen for normal people.

    • tearsintherain@leminal.space
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      7 months ago

      I could def be wrong, but it might have to do with Zaslav’s ‘vision’ to move focus towards ‘unscripted programming’, as in reality tv, true crime and live sports, less on scripted programming. My guess* is the car that’s laying about is reality tv and regular people. He’s not really helping create new shows, great storytelling, rather just using regular people to draw in viewers and rake in profits. I imagine the cost of unscripted programming is much less than truly scripted programming.