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"It seems as though the assumption is that higher pay for bosses comes solely at the expense of line workers."

Yeah, it does. Money given to bosses and shareholders is money not available to pay workers.

As an example, McDonald's has a net income of of $4.686 billion. The CEO gets paid 21.7 million of that, or 0.4%. That's net income, not revenue, which was $24.6 billion. Let's be honest, the money is there to pay workers more money, and the CEO's pay does not redirect any meaningful amount of that available cash away from employees.

To be clear, my issue is not that workers shouldn't be paid more, it is that justification for higher worker pay shouldn't be "my boss gets paid more than me."

I think it absolutely should be. They're benefitting from the company doing better (in fact, in many cases, they're benefitting despite the company doing shitty), why should the actual workers doing the actual work not benefit as well?

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