A major problem is the rapid increase in the spread between the highly paid and the lowly paid in the past 30 or 40 year. At the beginning of that period big corporation CEOs were earning about 40 times what their low level workers were paid. In the run-up to the 2007 bust, that ratio had grown from 40 to 1 all the way to from 400 to 1,000 to 1. Somehow I doubt that CEOs became 10 to 25 TIMES more valuable in the past 30 years. Of course all the people at the upper levels beneath the CEOs have been similarly elevated.
Today I read that the head of Ford Motors is being paid $58 million this year. Ford is about to enter negotiations with the United Auto Workers. They will be fighting over salaries of from $50 to $58,000. Thus Ford’s CEO will be earning around 1,000 times what his line workers will get. Do you think maybe they are pixxed as hexx about that and will drive a hard bargain, while the poor Ford execs cry in their champaign that, “well we just tried so hard to get Ford profitable again, we deserve to be obscenely rich.”
I am a small stockholder of GE, which before the crash was selling at $50 per share. I was outraged to see from my annual reports, that while the stock was tanking to $5/share and eventually rose to around $20/share where it has stagnated for the past 4 years, the top 7 executives were all paid from $11 to $22 million, and did not take any salary reduction at all. We stock holders have to raise bloody heck at this outrageous, unmerited greed. Google “Forbes CEO Compensation to see how overpaid your favorite CEO is, or how much your favorite industry is paying. For those worried about Obamacare, check out the drug and medical supplies companies.
I started as a tomato picker. Where did you start?
Sorry to hear about your stock and I agree with you. My husband works very hard and actually about 5 years ago he had to take about a 30% pay cut it was a shock but we were okay although I missed the extra cash then he was laid off and got another job at even less money. He got a raise this year of a whopping $30.00 a month it wasn’t even enough to make up for the increase in our utilities.