|
 |
 |
|
| ||||
          | |||||||
| |||||||
| |||||||
|
||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
||||||||||||||
 |
« Previous Entry | Main | Next Entry » Is it too much to ask that the top CEOs of a big corporation be paid no more than five to 10 times the wage of the lowest paid full-time employee? Name:
Janette D. Sherman
Question/Comment: Is it too much to ask that the top CEOs of a big corporation be paid no more than five to 10 times the wage of the lowest paid full-time employee? Radical, but the pay scale of so many at the top of these companies is obscene. And why were the heads of Freddy and Fanny allowed to walk away with such pay packages when obviously they had made a mess? Paul Solman: The head of Freddie is not walking away with much, from what I've read. I don't know about Fannie. As to a five or 10:1 ratio, that seems unrealistic. Even if a big corporation's minimum wage were $20/hour ($40k/year), a 5:1 ratio would mean paying the CEO no more than $200,000; 10:1, $400,000. You'd lose a lot of talented people if you capped pay at those prices. But hey, according to a chart in the Christian Science Monitor last year, the U.S. won the world disparity gold medal with a ratio of 400:1. Mexico came in a distant second at 61:1; Canada, France and South Korea all came in at 23:1 and ever-so-egalitarian Japan managed 11:1. So maybe I should take it back. Maybe 10:1 isn't nuts. But at this point, even 100:1 would be a huge achievement. On the other hand, there's seems little doubt we'll start moving in the right direction, if for no other reason than that profits are waning. -- Posted September 22, 2008 | Comments (7) | Permalink
 TrackBacksListed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Is it too much to ask that the top CEOs of a big corporation be paid no more than five to 10 times the wage of the lowest paid full-time employee?. TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/mt4/mt-tb.cgi/701 7 CommentsLeave a comment |
|
|
 |
||
|
 |
 |
|
ABOUT US |  |
FEEDBACK | |
SUBSCRIPTIONS / FEEDS: |  
| |
|
        |
|
| Support the kind of journalism done by the NewsHour...Become a member of your local PBS station. | ||
| ||
| PBS Online Privacy Policy Copyright ©1996- MacNeil/Lehrer Productions. All Rights Reserved. | ||
| ||
No doubt, I am naive and substantially ill-informed...but from this mouths-of-babes point of view...it seems to me it may be a reasonable experiment to limit CEO pay and risk having slightly less smart greedy sons-a-guns running some of these corporations.
You say you'd lose a lot of talented people if you capped salaries. Really? Where might these "talented" people go? Would they just turn into bums or something? I think they'd just learn to live within whatever income they make, just like the rest of us. That's the problem isn't it? They'd just be in the same boat as the rest of us, trying to make an honest living.
Doesn't Whole Foods Inc have stated salary goal for CEO salary to employee salary of about 25.
Do they have trouble keeping a CEO?
Why can't the CEOs see that they have taken too much money and put it back into the companies? Do they ever think of their usury or see the pain
of people who have been hurt by their practices? Do you know how to teach people to grow potatoes or make depression dumplings?
They use the same argument on the other end of the wage scale, but they call them lazy. I bet there are a lot of young talented hungry individuals that could do the job for a 10th of the compensation. How many MBA's are graduating each year? Supply and demand economics doesn't seem to apply to upper management/CEO levels.
Only Wall Street thinking, think people only work for money (or stock options), and that is what got us into this mess in the first place. Whatever happened to pride, doing a job well, helping people and society, being treated with respect, having some time to spend with your family.
Wasn't it Deming that said, export everything but American management.
Warren Buffett's salary $100k ;-)
http://www.betadaily.com/2008/03/19/5-things-you-may-not-know-about-warren-buffets-compensation/
How would it hurt the US if they did take their confidence games elsewhere? They could defraud Saudia arabian Princes and Iranians and be subjected to a legal system that would quickly solve both our problems.
Kenneth Galbraith suggested a ratio of highest-to-lowest-paid employees way back in the 1960's. Someone said 10-to-1 is too little and he said "Then make it 100-to-1 ... just have some ratio so that the income gap doesn't increase." I agree with him. His brief 1994 book "The Innocence of Economic Fraud" is a good insight into the myths of our current economy.