Directors remuneration mostly decided by other directors (and just approved by shareholders who are not bothered), who tend to take the view that it is worth paying directors very highly.

Its something that has got worse, but its not new. As GK Galbraith said "The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself."

If you want to be dramatic: we had negative real interest rates for a long while.

Nominal interest rates were close to 0% and inflation was positive.

> Shareholders don't appear to be worried about how the company actually runs in the details.

And shareholders who are interested get vilified as activists or short sellers.

> IE, the wages suggest workers don't really matter because they don't.

The labour share of GDP has been mostly stable for the last few decades between 55 to 65%-ish See https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LABSHPUSA156NRUG

Profits have also been fairly stable as a share of GDP at around 5-10%-ish: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/W273RE1A156NBEA

Just to be clear: going up or down by 5% of GDP is a lot in absolute terms, but not enough to justify hyperbole about "workers don't matter".

This, in turn, is caused by the size of the companies being so large.