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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, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Monday April 12 2021, @10:54AM (3 children)
The problem isn't that the US is a capitalist country, it's that it's a plutocracy.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Monday April 12 2021, @11:48AM (2 children)
Like I said, our brand of capitalism is broken...
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Taxi Dudinous on Monday April 12 2021, @01:16PM
Well what do you expect? Even the most appealing "isms" are broken in short order once people get involved. The philosophy can be warm and fuzzy, while the reality grows darker with each moment. The best "ism" needs to be resistant to human corruption. But they all have holes in them that will be exploited eventually, or from the very beginning. This was foreseen after all
Thomas Jefferson
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Monday April 12 2021, @10:37PM
Agree.
Market Capitalism, in theory, results in all vendors/workers earning about the same - they have the same product/labour offer, same location/access to market, same cost, etc.
What the US has is a market which has been twisted and distorted by monied interests to not even remotely resemble a level playing field. This is a problem in all Western economies, but the US not only turned it up to 11, it kept twisting the volume knob until it snapped and spun around another full circle.