CEO Pay On The Rise...Shocking!

Off Topic Politics and World Issues
1

How can anyone think this is right or fair? What kind of world am I living in? Get me off this fucking rock

Reuters
CEO pay and benefits on the rise: report
Wednesday August 29, 12:15 pm ET
By Joanne Morrison

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Top executives at major businesses last year made as much money in one day of work on the job as the average worker made over the entire year, according to a report released on Wednesday.
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Chief executive officers from the nation’s biggest businesses averaged nearly $11 million in total compensation, according to the 14th annual CEO compensation survey released jointly by the Institute for Policy Studies based in Washington and United for a Fair Economy, a national organization based in Boston.

At the same time, workers at the bottom rung of the U.S. economy received the first federal minimum wage increase in a decade. But the new wage of $5.85 an hour, after being adjusted for inflation, stands 7 percent below where the minimum wage stood a decade ago.

“CEO pay, over that same decade, has increased by roughly 45 percent,” the study found.

On average, CEOs at major American corporations saw $1.3 million in pension gains last year. By contrast, 58.5 percent of American households led by a 45- to 54-year old even had a retirement account in 2004, the most recent year these figures were available.

According to the report, between 2001 and 2004, retirement accounts of these average households gained only $3,775 in value a year.

The top 386 CEOs in the study took in perks, such as housing allowances and travel benefits, worth on average $438,342 in 2006. It would take a minimum wage worker 36 years to earn the equivalent of what CEOs averaged in just perks alone.

The 20 highest-paid individuals at publicly traded corporations last year took home, on average, $36.4 million. That’s 38 times more than the 20 highest-paid leaders in the non-profit sector and 204 times more than the 20 highest-paid generals in the U.S. military.

2

Fair? Life isn’t fair. If you don’t like it don’t work for them, buy from or invest their companies.

3

The primary shareholders of big, publicly traded corporations are institutional investors. Institutional investors care about one thing only - the rate of return on investment.

If institutional investors thought CEO pay was too high, they wouldn’t agree to pay it via shareholder “democracy”. Institutional investors have exactly zero interest in paying a CEO more than he/she is worth - that is less money for the institutional investor.

Are CEOs salaries “out of whack”? Maybe - like any market, assets can get overpriced. But it doesn’t have as much to do with “conspiracies” between the CEO and the corporation’s shareholders as the critics suggest.

4

If said CEO’s are providing a proportional value to their shareholders then I say they earn it.

What gets me is when a company LOSES money and a CEO gets a mult-million dollar parachute when he leaves.

In those cases the Board should be publicly flogged for not looking after shareholder interests when they approved the compensation package.

Many CEO’s sit on their buddies Boards and vice versa. They approve huge compensation packages for each other in what amounts to a large circle jerk. Average shareholders and employees are the ones who get fleeced.

5

I really don’t care how much they make. If they can be millionaires then be millionaires. That part doesn’t bother me, I wish I was a millionaire too. What does bother me about most of these assholes is that every time they need to cut costs the lay a bunch of people off, yet cash their multi-million dollar bonus checks on time. They will cast the people out, who actually do the work and make the company the money right be for report time to make the bottom line look better and make no cuts into their exorbitant and ridiculous salaries.

Cuts should start at the top and putting people out of work should be the last thing a company does, yet it is often the first. Save money, cut people. I really think most of these upper management folks are bottom dwellers and have a soul satan is envious of. When ever I shake the hand of someone in upper management, I feel like I need to wash it.

I don’t agree with your statement of “right and fair”. If you can make millions of bucks, go for it. If you lead your company well and it’s making money by all means, fill up your pockets. But if the company hits hard times don’t keep making 50 mil, while sending 500 people to the unemployment line. That’s just dick headed, which is why I think most of them are dick heads.
People wonder why office shootings happen, I wonder why they don’t happen more often.

6

[quote]Zap Branigan wrote:
Fair? Life isn’t fair. If you don’t like it don’t work for them, buy from or invest their companies.
[/quote]
How cliche.

If you lived with a 100 people on an island and one group of 4 people found all the fresh water and food, you’d have no problem with them rationing it out in extremely small amounts to the rest of the 96 people?

I can’t understand people like you. No one should have millions of dollars while people are starving. If you believe otherwise, you’re insane.

7

[quote]pat36 wrote:
I really don’t care how much they make. If they can be millionaires then be millionaires. That part doesn’t bother me, I wish I was a millionaire too. What does bother me about most of these assholes is that every time they need to cut costs the lay a bunch of people off, yet cash their multi-million dollar bonus checks on time. They will cast the people out, who actually do the work and make the company the money right be for report time to make the bottom line look better and make no cuts into their exorbitant and ridiculous salaries.

Cuts should start at the top and putting people out of work should be the last thing a company does, yet it is often the first. Save money, cut people. I really think most of these upper management folks are bottom dwellers and have a soul satan is envious of. When ever I shake the hand of someone in upper management, I feel like I need to wash it.

I don’t agree with your statement of “right and fair”. If you can make millions of bucks, go for it. If you lead your company well and it’s making money by all means, fill up your pockets. But if the company hits hard times don’t keep making 50 mil, while sending 500 people to the unemployment line. That’s just dick headed, which is why I think most of them are dick heads.
People wonder why office shootings happen, I wonder why they don’t happen more often.

[/quote]
Though I completely disagree with you about the making millions part, as, let me clarify, becoming wealthy is great. Becoming extravagently, mind boggingly, excessively rich is beyond absurd. What person needs to make anymore than a million dollars a year? That’s asinine.

Aside from that, I agree completely with the rest of your post. Good stuff.

8

[quote]pat36 wrote:
I really don’t care how much they make. If they can be millionaires then be millionaires. That part doesn’t bother me, I wish I was a millionaire too. What does bother me about most of these assholes is that every time they need to cut costs the lay a bunch of people off, yet cash their multi-million dollar bonus checks on time. They will cast the people out, who actually do the work and make the company the money right be for report time to make the bottom line look better and make no cuts into their exorbitant and ridiculous salaries.

Cuts should start at the top and putting people out of work should be the last thing a company does, yet it is often the first. Save money, cut people. I really think most of these upper management folks are bottom dwellers and have a soul satan is envious of. When ever I shake the hand of someone in upper management, I feel like I need to wash it.

I don’t agree with your statement of “right and fair”. If you can make millions of bucks, go for it. If you lead your company well and it’s making money by all means, fill up your pockets. But if the company hits hard times don’t keep making 50 mil, while sending 500 people to the unemployment line. That’s just dick headed, which is why I think most of them are dick heads.
People wonder why office shootings happen, I wonder why they don’t happen more often.

[/quote]

I could not have said it any better.

Wealth distribution is uneven in the corporations, and it’s uneven in the world. 10% of the people control 80% of the wealth.

We fight their wars and break our backs, and they cash in.

9

[quote]Inner Hulk wrote:

How cliche.

If you lived with a 100 people on an island and one group of 4 people found all the fresh water and food, you’d have no problem with them rationing it out in extremely small amounts to the rest of the 96 people?

I can’t understand people like you. No one should have millions of dollars while people are starving. If you believe otherwise, you’re insane.[/quote]

Completely false analogy. On the island, there is a finite amount of wealth - it becomes a zero-sum game.

In the modern economy, that zero-sum game does not exist. A corporation doesn’t have a “piece of the pie” to the exclusion of someone who doesn’t.

10

[quote]FightinIrish26 wrote:
pat36 wrote:
I really don’t care how much they make. If they can be millionaires then be millionaires. That part doesn’t bother me, I wish I was a millionaire too. What does bother me about most of these assholes is that every time they need to cut costs the lay a bunch of people off, yet cash their multi-million dollar bonus checks on time. They will cast the people out, who actually do the work and make the company the money right be for report time to make the bottom line look better and make no cuts into their exorbitant and ridiculous salaries.

Cuts should start at the top and putting people out of work should be the last thing a company does, yet it is often the first. Save money, cut people. I really think most of these upper management folks are bottom dwellers and have a soul satan is envious of. When ever I shake the hand of someone in upper management, I feel like I need to wash it.

I don’t agree with your statement of “right and fair”. If you can make millions of bucks, go for it. If you lead your company well and it’s making money by all means, fill up your pockets. But if the company hits hard times don’t keep making 50 mil, while sending 500 people to the unemployment line. That’s just dick headed, which is why I think most of them are dick heads.
People wonder why office shootings happen, I wonder why they don’t happen more often.

I could not have said it any better.

Wealth distribution is uneven in the corporations, and it’s uneven in the world. 10% of the people control 80% of the wealth.

We fight their wars and break our backs, and they cash in.[/quote]

Both statements are well said and I agree with them wholeheartedly.

11

Thats the perks of being on top. If it was you in there you would compensate yourself whole-heartedly, think about it you can’t say you wouldnt. Besides your talking about CEOz from top 14 companies, these are juggernauts not Subway franchise owners. You reap what you sow in every aspect of life. Find a way to get there…they did.

12

[quote]Inner Hulk wrote:
Zap Branigan wrote:
Fair? Life isn’t fair. If you don’t like it don’t work for them, buy from or invest their companies.

How cliche.

If you lived with a 100 people on an island and one group of 4 people found all the fresh water and food, you’d have no problem with them rationing it out in extremely small amounts to the rest of the 96 people?

I can’t understand people like you. No one should have millions of dollars while people are starving. If you believe otherwise, you’re insane.[/quote]

What rationing? You want money? Earn it!

13

So they had the insight, work ethic and smarts to work their way in to a high paying job. Businesses in the US are privately owned and can pay whomever what ever they want. If a business’ shareholders feel their CEO is worth $11 million dollars per year, then he is.

It’s not like the guy is stealing the money from your bank account. He just has a better job.

14

Ugh.

Here’s the problem, which I can’t possibly understand why you guys don’t see.

"Executive pay jumped 571 percent between 1990 and 2000. CEO pay rose even in 2000, a year in which the S&P 500 suffered a 10 percent loss. The explosion in CEO pay over the decade dwarfed the 37 percent growth in worker pay.

If the average annual pay for production workers had grown at the same rate since 1990 as it has for CEOs, their 2000 annual earnings would have been $120,491 instead of $24,668. Likewise, if the minimum wage, which stood at $3.80 an hour in 1990, had grown at the same rate as CEO pay over the decade, it would now be $25.50 an hour, rather than the current $5.15 an hour."

You guys see nothing wrong with that?

For one, what about the influence the excessively wealthy have upon our political institutions? Politicians rely on campaign contributors to get elected, just who do you think is donating 200,000 to insert schmo senator/president here?

Everyone here knows that money makes our political system go round, and to allow such excessively wealthy individuals access to it completely defeats the purpose of a “representative government”.

You’re telling me a CEO of a company making 400 times the amount that a blue collar worker in the same company is not wrong? What’s wrong with you people? Seriously. You see no problem with the ever widening gap between upper and middle/lower class? You can’t see that they’re completely eliminating the middle class? Are you that blind?

Aside from that, what about the fact that minimum wage is never getting a bump?

You fucking conservatives want to bitch and complain about welfare and other government assistant programs, yet you say nothing about the wage’s paid to people in this country. You expect people not to need aid when minimum wage has been 5.15 for 10 years? That’s a liveable wage?

Luckily for the poverty stricken in this country, minimum wage has been increased a whopping 70 cents this year!!! Thanks congress! Go ahead and vote yourselves that yearly raise you guys have been doing for the past decade.

This is what’s wrong. The completely unbalanced distribution of wealth. It’s not only concentrated in the hands of the few, it’s completely consumed by the few.

That’s fucked up. That’s wrong. No matter what you think, that’s wrong. If you think otherwise, you’re wrong. That’s not an opinion, that’s a fact.

" In 1999, Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett, and Microsoft alumnus Paul Allen had combined wealth of $156 billion.2 This topped the combined GNPs of the poorest 43 nations on earth.3 By 1999, the world’s 475 billionaires had combined wealth of over $1.7 trillion, well above the combined incomes of the world’s poorest half of humanity."

Way to set the US up for an inevtiable economic disaster.

15

[quote]texasguy1 wrote:
So they had the insight, work ethic and smarts to work their way in to a high paying job. Businesses in the US are privately owned and can pay whomever what ever they want. If a business’ shareholders feel their CEO is worth $11 million dollars per year, then he is.

It’s not like the guy is stealing the money from your bank account. He just has a better job. [/quote]

If a company is selling shares of ownership, it is not a private company.

Publicly traded companies are mandated by federal law to look out first and foremost for their stock price. This law is in place to remove any conflicts of interest between the management and shareholders.

(Ex. Employees wish to pay themselves far above market rate just because they have the money while shareholders want the company to maximize profits and dole out dividends. Rather than let this turn into a clusterfuck, the Federal Gov’t stepped in and ordered publicly traded companies to emphasize stock price.)

Stock options were given as a form of compensation to motivate executives to increase the stock price of the companies. I.e. Stock price goes way up, executives get lots and lots of $$$$.

Of course, now the very top CEOs are getting seemingly crazy - at least in the minds of those criticizing their compensation - compensation packages because they are doing their jobs too well.

Fucking over the lower level employees is actually pretty rare because it’s just not good business. It’s taken a few decades, but nearly all large corporations have learned by now to treat their employees fairly, lest they get hit with something expensive from the courts, the feds, or the unions.

And if nothing else, they realize that they can’t attract good employees without compensating them fairly, and they can’t compete (and thus raise their stock price) without good employees.

16

[quote]Inner Hulk wrote:
If you lived with a 100 people on an island and one group of 4 people found all the fresh water and food, you’d have no problem with them rationing it out in extremely small amounts to the rest of the 96 people?
[/quote]

A fellow named Locke already worked this out a while ago. His solution? One can claim as one’s own what one mixes with one’s own labor and which doesn’t spoil. Luckily, we have a wonderful thing called money that converts goods that spoil into goods that don’t spoil.

Besides: what if the 96 other people refused to hunt, or decided that they would do other jobs instead of getting food? What if they decided, amongst themselves, that their labors were not equally deserving of reward, and that some of them ought to receive more than others? So the men who hunt are obligated to “ration” their goods so that they may maximize their return on those efforts.

But, as thunderbolt already pointed out, your analogy is completely false.

Who in the US is starving? Do you really want to make that argument? What arbitrary cap do you think we should set on success? And what rewards do you think there should be for exceptional accomplishment?

17

[quote]Inner Hulk wrote:
" In 1999, Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett, and Microsoft alumnus Paul Allen had combined wealth of $156 billion.2 This topped the combined GNPs of the poorest 43 nations on earth.3 By 1999, the world’s 475 billionaires had combined wealth of over $1.7 trillion, well above the combined incomes of the world’s poorest half of humanity."
[/quote]

Funny you should mention Bill Gates and Warren Buffett in the context of your post.

Funny considering that they donated around $40 billion to a charitable foundation to help humanity.

Their horrible, money-grubbing ways have created thousands of jobs, given society many advancements that led directly to opportunities for literally millions of people worldwide, and recently put forth $40 billion - that’s forty billion dollars - to help society.

What have you done?

18

Here’s what bothers me more, CEOs pay less as a percentage of their earnings in taxes as their employees.

He even offered a cool million to back up his claim.

Now THAT pisses me off.

The other thing is CEOs that destroy companies, but still get millions. That list is so freaking long its unreal…

19

[quote]Ren wrote:
Here’s what bothers me more, CEOs pay less as a percentage of their earnings in taxes as their employees.

He even offered a cool million to back up his claim.

Now THAT pisses me off.

The other thing is CEOs that destroy companies, but still get millions. That list is so freaking long its unreal…[/quote]

Agreed and quoted for truth. Our income tax system is fucked up as all hell.

20

[quote]nephorm wrote:
But, as thunderbolt already pointed out, your analogy is completely false.[/quote]
He made the claim that money is infinite. This is not true.

There are 36.5 million people in poverty in the US. Though those numbers are probably understated.

There should be a set amount of how much a CEO can make. I think it was JP Morgan back in the 90’s who said that a CEO should not make more than 20 times what the lowest paid employee of the company makes.

And exceptional accomplishment? Such as? Moving business outside of the US to evade certain taxes or outsourcing to cut employee costs? Firing mass amounts of people to keep profits up? Are these the type of exceptional accomplishments you’re referring to?