"If the minimum wage had kept pace with the rise in executive salaries since 1990, America's poorest paid workers would today be making more than $23 an hour."
I'm not suggesting the minimum wage should be $23 an hour. If that were the case we'd never export anything and we'd be covered up with ridiculously cheap imports....which would mean maybe 2 guys would be making $23 an hour and the rest of us would be unemployed. What I am suggesting is that executives make too much.
How do you maximize profits? It's easy. Make people work twice as hard for less pay. Look around you....that's how business works today. They cut staffing, increasing everyone else's workload, yet raises (if there are any) barely cover inflation. Raises for everyone, that is, except the executives. I don't see this as a liberal / conservative / socialist / capitalist issue. To me it's just a matter of fairness. Does "fairness" take sides?
Pendulums swing both ways, you know.
S
This is a tough one, I agree many execs receive rediculously high salaries, often for screwing up. My old firm Merrill Lynch went belly up. They had a business that should have thrived forever, but got greedy and took risks to inflate stock prices. Many employees lost their jobs and Stan O'neil left with a 50+ million dollar golden parachute. How and who determones what is fair executive pay. Certianly not government. Should be the stockholders I guess, but it does not always work that way. I think corporate governance is slowly starting to take a longer harder look t exec pay. but you are right trouble is "fairness" ends up with everyone being broke execpt the people who decide what is fair.
ReplyDeleteGood post to make people think
Cranky Old Man
I'm hoping that come election time momentum will build for the pendulum to swing back to the center. Take care.
ReplyDeleteGulp...$23 an hour, huh?
ReplyDeleteThese are just my anecdotal observations, but when stuff like this happens, people who can will quit their jobs with those big corporations who pay their top-level executives those insane salaries and bonuses. They then will start their own, small business. In the last 14 months, I've seen three of my supervisors do this.
I know for them the cost of health care coverage is a big concern. I do hope/believe that health insurance reform may help many of these new, small businesses. Eventually, big corporations will realize how many employees they are losing due to this huge unfairness. As you said, this pendulum swings back and forth.