America’s top corporate executives love lecturing the rest of us about ‘fiscal responsibility.’ They want us to expect less from government. But they expect more, and a new report on the chief executives campaigning to “fix the debt” shows exactly how they’re getting it.
How much did America’s top corporate executives make last year? The scorekeepers don’t all agree. But that won’t matter if we keep our eyes on the most important figure of all: the compensation gap between CEOs and their workers.
Britain’s top unions will soon be flexing their shareholder muscles — and insisting that the corporations where their pension funds have investments start taking significant steps to narrow the pay divide between executives and workers. And the unions have a specific pay ratio in mind.
All across Corporate America, top executives have been feathering their own nests at the expense of their employees. The French have a better idea. And so did the famed business analyst Peter Drucker, the Austrian-born American who founded modern management science.
From hiking trails in Oregon to boardrooms in Berlin, critics of our unequal corporate order are calling for limits that link executive to worker pay. So far this winter striking pitches for income caps have come from a new environmental manifesto and Germany’s top corporate watchdog.
Federal regulators have actually been cracking down somewhat lately on financial industry fraud. But the power-suited executives responsible for that fraud are still paying no personal price.
The old robber barons exploited workers and gouged consumers. Today’s robber barons are making tens of millions off a lucrative new class of victims: average American taxpayers. In 2011, 26 top U.S. corporations paid their chief execs more than they paid Uncle Sam.
A perfectly respectable business panel is urging corporate boards to ditch the ridiculous rationalizations for CEO pay excess and narrow the gargantuan corporate pay gap. Step one: end CEO stock options.
A string of surprising ‘say on pay’ votes has some executive pay critics sensing an impending revolution in corporate boardrooms. But that ‘revolution’ won’t amount to much until CEO pay reformers start factoring worker pay into the corporate compensation equation.
So few Americans are cheering America’s rising productivity, a new Economic Policy Institute report suggests, because so few Americans are sharing in the new wealth that boosts in productivity have been creating over the past three decades. That wealth has gone largely to the top.