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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 bradley13 on Monday April 12 2021, @11:03AM (7 children)
Winston Churchill once said of democracy: "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried." Much the same could be said of capitalism. It's a system prone to abuses, but it remains infinitely better than socialism, communism, or any other system that has been tried.
The proper role of government is to minimize those abuses through regulation. I've mentioned before that one regulation should be to limit the size of companies. "Too big to fail" should not exist, nor should large companies be allowed to buy up their smaller, more nimble competitors.
The problem with top management salaries is similar. Imagine, for example, a regulation stating that the highest remuneration in a company could not exceed the lowest (including contracted employees) by more than a factor of - let's pick a number - 50. If the janitor earns $10/hour, for a full-time wage of $20k, then the CEO cannot earn more than $1 million (including bonuses, stock options, etc.). If the CEO wants a raise, he has to start with the janitor's salary.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by EJ on Monday April 12 2021, @11:50AM (2 children)
Believe it or not, the SEC actually has some amount of power to require this type of thing for publicly traded companies.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday April 12 2021, @12:49PM (1 child)
But do they?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 12 2021, @11:46PM
no, they run interference for the established interests. just look at what they are doing against lbry/odysee.com right now.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DannyB on Monday April 12 2021, @02:02PM (3 children)
Problem: today we have a lot of people who do not believe in democracy. If the election doesn't go their way, they are happy to overthrow, or to cheer on those who would overthrow the majority to install a minority into power. Then they refer to themselves as 'patriots'. Because they believe something that cannot be proven, despite all evidence to the contrary.
OMG! The dreaded word: regulation!
But seriously, if government didn't regulate things, then what other purpose would government have? The reason humans have had peacefully elected governments for a while now in modern times, is to have laws and regulations so that everyone can live together relatively peacefully. Norms of behavior at the very least. Laws if necessary.
Don't tell me you would want to burden the rich in order to give some people at the bottom a living wage?
If you think a fertilized egg is a child but an immigrant child is not, please don't pretend your concerns are religious
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 12 2021, @03:44PM
I'm not bradley13, but I would. Yeah, I'm kind of a bastard that way.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 12 2021, @11:50PM
We need to break this country up. Fuck you dumb pieces of shit that voted for Biden/Harris. Please fucking start trying to take guns and see what happens. Please send Beto so i can feed him to the pigs. Ammo is pretty much sold out everywhere and guns are very limited. You bolsheviks are going to get yours soon.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 14 2021, @01:35AM
On the contrary, it's not that they don't believe in democracy, it's that they believe the other party cheated.
There is some anecdotal evidence that they are right, but what convinces most of them is the resistance to changes that would reduce said cheating. Why would you oppose improving standards unless you are exploiting the low standards?