You aren't wrong, but it's not reasonable to hold such a strong opinion without experience. I spent 15 years working in high-tech manufacturing, at Sanmina, which - like many peers - also offshored the majority of capacity. What remains in the US is mostly manufacturing for regulated industry (military, medical).

Take a look at this, re institutional ownership: https://money.cnn.com/quote/shareholders/shareholders.html?s.... 95% of outstanding stock is owned institutionally, which is pretty normal in manufacturing. For decades, this has been a core investment sector for pensions and other institutional funds, and remains so, even if it's just to balance investments in tech, biotech/pharma, retail/CPG, financial services, the military industrial complex and transportation. Moreover, if you attend quarterly results calls, you typically end up with a few analysts from banks and at least one from some pension fund, who ask questions. We young people may not care about pensions as almost none of us will have one, but they still exist and still influence large pieces of our economy.

CEO pay is certainly way too high, I agree.

But look at any big corporation, take the CEO's total compensation and divide it by the number of employees. The CEO of IBM earns an obscene $16.5 million per year - but divide that by IBM's 288,300 employees and it's $60 per employee per year. Wal-mart's CEO makes $25.31 million, but it's only $12 per employee per year.

Even if we redistributed the CEO's entire salary to workers, $60/year isn't going to do much to close the gap between rich and poor.

Pension funds is shorthand for pension funds and other bulk investments for other people vehicles like BlackRock and Vanguard. A common complaint from people is that there's under ten entities that owns almost all of the major public firms. Matt Levine has very funny and informed takes on this sort of thing, ZeroHedge et al have conspiratorial ones, but it's a real thing.

If I am a faceless pension fund that is going to earn short term on this much better, and be free to walk away and do the same thing to another company?

Sure.

This is exactly the same playbook as with private equity - the point is to make the shareholders richer as fast as possible, and long-term strategies do not pay out as fast while possibly introducing longer term risks.

For short term profit that I can walk away with? That is very different from building long term value. Both are profit. One profits from creation and has long term recurring benefits, the other profits from extraction, which only happens once. Both building a fire and building a house profit from a supply of wood. But they are pretty different in terms of long term pay off.

Please see the story of Jack Welch CEO of GE.

If I am a major shareholder, I would prefer a quick profit because I can then invest it somewhere else and have higher overall profits.