There is a lot of grousing out there about the excessive CEO salaries. With the current slogan, or one of them, going from Wall Street to Main Street, you can understand why Main Street is upset with the generous salaries chief executive offices receive. And then there are the bonuses, another point of contention, as we all witnessed during the AIG debacle.
You can’t blame people for being annoyed, if not completely outraged. Awarding large salaries often coincides with reducing the overall labor force. In this economic downturn, the reduction of labor means more people are being laid off. It means those that survive the downsizing are understaffed and must work longer and harder for the same money. Or less. In all, a lot of working folk are out on the street while others are still living on Easy Street. Small wonder this is a point of contention.
David Lazarus in the Los Angeles Times has written a most interesting column article calling for the limits of the salaries awarded to CEO’s. He calls for performance bonuses based on actual performance. What a concept. He writes about the true value of most CEO’s.
I find it sad that it is no longer unique in this country to be rewarded for failure. More and more people, bei it in government or the private sector, are promoted and bonsued for messing up. In the case of senior executives, many have been amply rewarded for running their respective companies, and the nation’s economy, into the ground. Then they are rescued from their failures. Everybody gets a trophy. Except of course for the people who were laid off from their jobs, the small business people who now struggle to obtain the credit necessary to run their businesses, and the students who still must pay back their loans. Interesting that the banks are rescued but the students are left to fend for themselves. Makes perfect sense. If we were in Superman’s Bizzarro World.
We know the argument that the CEO’s require large salaries but so few of them can actually run companies. I dbout it. And, again, most have run them into the ground, so in most cases of logic this would hardly constitute legitimate qualifications.
Smaller salaries at the senior level could translate into more employees who could run the business. More employees would mean the workload is spread around and that in turn may lead to less pressure and better quality of life. Meaning working people could actully do things like spend some time with their kids. To digress, I find it strange that Labor fought for the 40 hour work week. Now thanks to progress and cutting edge technology employees work 50 hours and more. Now that’a giant step…somewhere.
Not only would the reduced salaries assist in hiring more people, it may in fact insist in hiring more skilled persons at reasonable but higher salary levels. Preemployment screening programs could be refined to seek out the most skilled employment candidates from that vast talent pool that now resides in our unemployed society.
In terms of whether such proposals ever become a reality…we shall see.