CEO pay has been skyrocketing for years now, fueled in part by tax cuts for corporations and ultra wealthy individuals. That’s not just unfair to ordinary workers or taxpayers — it’s dangerous for our entire economy.
I’ve seen firsthand how these CEO pay practices incentivize the very worst kinds of corporate misbehavior.
Remember the 2016 “phony accounts” scandal at Wells Fargo? Executives relentlessly pressured employees to meet extreme sales quotas, leading them to create millions of fraudulent accounts without clients’ consent.
As these fake accounts grew, the CEO of Wells Fargo at the time, John Stumpf, raked in bigger and bigger bonuses. After the scandal blew up, regulators hit Stumpf with fines totalling $20 million — only a small dent in the estimated $130 million he walked away with in compensation when he resigned.
This is just one of countless stories of CEOs taking reckless actions to pump up their own paychecks while putting their employees and the general public at risk. We’ve seen the same pattern behind the opioid crisis, the 2008 financial crash, the toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, and more. But it’s the story I know best.
I started my career at Wells Fargo over 22 years ago — first as a teller, then as a branch manager, and later as an investigator in the department that handles misconduct allegations.
I would like to be able to say that things changed after the accounts scandal. Unfortunately, Wells Fargo’s current CEO, Charles Scharf, continues to cut corners in ways that put customers at risk.
Last year, we found out about a plan to cut costs by outsourcing jobs from our investigations department to India, where, in an ironic twist, we reviewed human rights complaints from Wells Fargo employees forced to stay at work even after falling ill. We were concerned not only about losing our jobs but about how this might put our clients’ private information at risk — a particular concern for our many active-duty military clients.