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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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 13 2021, @05:53AM
yes. you are supposed to recognize that the word "poor" today refers to people who are richer than the rich of even a couple of hundred years ago. I have to work for a living. and yet, I got to travel the world, I have read hundreds of books before my 40th birthday, I have two healthy kids that my wife and I chose to have (and my son didn't lose his arm when a finger cut got infected). and a number of other things, I'm not going to list them all.
apparently it's true that in the US there has been a recent increase of inequality. but that shouldn't be a problem in itself. the thing to strive for is raising the standard of living of the poor.
one "solution" would be to take from the salary of the CEOs and give to the salaries of everyone else, which is what this article seems to be about. ok. that's an opinion. but the original poster of this thread was arguing that the current state of affairs is similar to Roman times, in particular to the decay of the Roman empire. I wanted to point out that things were worse in Roman times for the poor and the rich alike.