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There are two determinants of your pay. One is supply and demand, and the other is how much could your potential replacement screw things up. For most workers the supply/demand is the only part that matters because if you are a line worker, you don't really have the potential to do much damage if you screw up. So if Ford needs to replace a competent line worker, their potential bad replacement won't be able to cost the company much even in the worst case, so this does not grant the worker any leverage.

CEOs are much different. A bad CEO can cost a large company 10s of billions in stock valuation. If you have a decent CEO, and you fire and replace him with a poor replacement, the damage to the company will be tremendous, so the board won't want to risk it. This gives good CEOs the leverage to demand massive compensation. A CEO can basically hold the company hostage by saying "I want a $10 million raise this year, and if I don't get it I'll quit. Have fun rolling the dice with my replacement!" (Though they would never actually say it that way) And the company will basically have to choose to pay an extra $10 million or roll the dice on potentially losing billions. This is why they almost always pay CEOs a massive amount.




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