Fitzgerald may or may not have been talking about CEO pay packages. If he was, "different" is putting it mildly.
Louis Hyman, business historian at Cornell University, puts it this way: "For CEO's, it's like they're winning the lottery year after year. It's grotesque how unequal [pay scales] have become."
A recent article in the New York Times reports on the compensation of CEO's of public companies with annual revenue of $1 billion or more. Dodd-Frank requires that companies disclose, for the first time starting with 2017, their pay ratios -- a comparison of CEO pay to median employee pay. The One Percent is going strong as the pay gap grows ever wider, and Trump's corporate tax giveaway accelerates the spread. Little wonder corporate America wants Dodd-Frank to go away.
Here's the link to the full article: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/25/business/highest-paid-ceos-2017.html?rref=collection%2Fbyline%2Fdavid-gelles&action=click&contentCollection=undefined®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=collection
And a link to an illustrative chart of CEO pay rankings:
I'll summarize a few of the have/have not stand-outs from the 2017 figures.
Weight Watchers -- $33.4 million total CEO pay, $6013 median employee pay. Pay ratio 5550:1. (CEO makes 5550 times more than the average worker. But stock price did increase 287% in 2017.)
Mattel -- $31.3 million total CEO total pay, $6271 median employee pay. Pay ratio 4987:1. (Revenues fell 11%, stock price dropped 41%, CEO was fired.)
McDonald's -- $21.8 million CEO total pay, $7017 median employee pay. Pay ratio 3101:1.
First Data (credit card processor) -- $102.2 million CEO total pay, $50,406 median employee pay. Pay ratio 2028:1.
Walmart -- $22.2 million total CEO pay, $19,177 median employee pay. Pay ratio 1188:1.
Etc., etc. Plenty more where those came from. No one is suggesting that everyone should earn the same amount of money, but this shit is ridiculous and only getting worse. The question is, what to do about it.
Short of another Great Depression or Storming of the Bastille, I really don't know. It's not right.
At least the Weight Watchers CEO is a woman. BTW, I know she risked it, but our next President, Oprah, put $43.5M into Weight Watchers about two and a-half years ago. That's now worth over $400M. In a short two and one-half years, she made what it would take the WW CEO 8 plus years to make. The math is beyond me, but maybe you can calculate the ratio of Oprah's earnings to the WW average worker. Yeah, Oprah, ain't like us, and neither is Mindy Grossman. It's all about the almighty dollar!
ReplyDelete