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from the because-when-they-mess-up-they-only-have-a-golden-parachute...wait-a-minute dept.
Why are CEOs of U.S. firms paid 320 times as much as their workers?:
Last August, Jamelle Brown, a technician at Research Medical Center in Kansas City, Missouri, contracted Covid-19 while on the job sanitizing and sterilizing rooms in the facility's emergency department. Luckily, his case wasn't severe, and after having quarantined, he was back at work.
Upon his return, Brown was named Employee of the Month in his unit and given a gift voucher for use in the hospital cafeteria. The amount: $6.
"That stung me to the bone," said Brown, who makes $13.77 an hour and has worked for almost four years at the hospital, owned by the corporate giant HCA Healthcare. "It made me sit back and say, 'This place doesn't care for me.'"
Research Medical's owner, HCA Healthcare Inc., is a profitable, publicly traded network of 185 hospitals and 121 freestanding surgery centers in 20 states and England. Even in the year of Covid-19, 2020, the company generated $51.5 billion in revenue and increased its pretax earnings by 3.6 percent. Its shares are up by 14 percent this year, versus 10 percent on the Standard & Poor's 500 index.
That performance helped boost the total compensation HCA's chief executive, Samuel N. Hazen, received last year to $30.4 million, a 13 percent rise from 2019, documents show. Although Hazen's salary was 5.8 percent lower in 2020, the total worth of his compensation package equaled 556 times the compensation received by the median employee at HCA — $54,651.
The figures highlight the growing CEO pay gap, a problem among many public companies according to some investors and workers and even a few CEOs. In 2019, for example, the average pay ratio among 350 large American companies was 320-to-1, according to research by the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank in Washington, D.C. In 1989, the average was 61-to-1.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by C0L0PH0N on Monday April 12 2021, @10:06AM (14 children)
Yikes!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 12 2021, @10:35AM (4 children)
FWIW at a hospital system like St. Jude's, one million dollars is actually considered to be low.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 12 2021, @01:14PM (3 children)
I would daresay those two CEO salaries are entirely in-line given underlings. ASPCA is 6-12x median salary and St. Jude's is 4x-16x between Doctors and Nurses (most likely). While they may seem high compared to regular employees, they do seem in line with pay for the stress and risk of CEO, unlike say Mozilla Foundation or Wikipedia, where the CEOs offer next to no value, and basically leech off volunteers or much lower paid employees who are first on the firing line rater than the CEOs taking a salary cut.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 12 2021, @10:27PM
At many (most?) hospitals, clinics and healthcare systems, the CEO and administration aren't even the highest paid individuals there. It wasn't until you started seeing the conglomeration of healthcare providers that such changes in compensation started to become commonplace.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 12 2021, @11:34PM (1 child)
the stress and risk of the CEO? lmao. what a joke. they're not *that* fucking smart and hard working. just shrewd in using their money and position to their advantage.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 13 2021, @01:24AM
Exactly, there is a reason why there are so many stories throughout human history about rich people regretting their life choices and learning how to be better people. Pursuing money is fine, but someone's goal of being rich should not come at the cost of thousands of other people's suffering.
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Monday April 12 2021, @12:41PM (2 children)
United For Respect, the non-profit organization in TFA, has No data on Charity Navigator [charitynavigator.org], my go-to for this kind of thing.
We don't know if she's pulling a BLM or not.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 12 2021, @09:05PM (1 child)
According to the 2018 990, the highest paid person makes $52,950.
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Tuesday April 13 2021, @03:45AM
Now that I know about 990 I was able to use the EIN 13-3885314 and did some more digging to get multiple years [propublica.org], including years prior when they were organized under a different name. Thanks for sending me down that rabbit-hole, but I haven't returned from Wonderland yet and may not. I don't get paid enough here to audit stuff (and I'm not a professional in that field).
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 3, Touché) by hendrikboom on Monday April 12 2021, @12:46PM (1 child)
Do you really mean
?
It's probably true, but is it what you intended to say?
-- hendrik
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 14 2021, @01:21AM
You get a touche because you wouldn't believe how many times I had to read both before I realized what you were talking about.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by canopic jug on Monday April 12 2021, @01:24PM (1 child)
The CEO of Mozilla [soylentnews.org], which gets nearly all of its money in handouts from Google, gets compensated over $3,000,000 per year apparently. All the while Firefox is losing market share, double for Thunderbird.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 12 2021, @01:56PM
That's pauper-pay compared to Marxists [redstate.com]
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Monday April 12 2021, @07:28PM
Gotta kill the 501(c). It will solve a whole bunch of problems.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 12 2021, @11:39PM
this is what i do. the one wally world was pushing ~10 years ago was paying their Suited Whore $500k a yr. These CEOs are career upper management and are already very wealthy when they take these "non profit" jobs. If they had a shred of decency they would do it for free for a couple years, pas it off to the next one and start a trend. Your mansion mortgage and your kids ivy league school shouldn't be on the charity's back, you shameless, greedy fucks.