Out of interest, what do you think an 'owner' does in an enterprise with an executive branch, apart from supplying passive capital at the start?

Owners ensure the efficient allocation of capital. Their job is to pull investment from unprofitable activities and move it to profitable ones. They may only make one or two decisions a year, but those are weighty decisions with large consequences. With good decisions may come large profits with what looks to an outsider to be little effort, but they may also lose it all with just one mistake... appointing the wrong CEO, or failing to liquidate the company when it ceases to be profitable...

Now there may certainly be issues with corporate governance and conflict with non-financial goals like environmental sustainability, but that's a wholly different complaint to the suggestion that there is a non-working class at the helm.

Cool, that's certainly important. I probably disagree that 1 or 2 decisions a year counts as "real jobs that do real work", though.

Hires and fires the executives. Doing that wrong is catastrophic.

he must mean people like this:

“He eats lunch when he arrives at work at 2 p.m. Then, like clockwork, he goes to sleep with a cup of soda on the table and the straw in it,” said Marvin Robbins, a union vice president.

http://nypost.com/2013/05/28/labor-big-a-real-heavy-sleeper/