Something odd is happening with wages

You can’t help but notice that the gap between the upper and lower end of wages seems to be growing.

CEOs of major corporations are dragging in ten, twenty and thirty million dollars a year in wages and stock options. CEO salaries seem to go up regardless of the financial well-being of the companies they direct.

I’ve tried to imagine just what any single CEO could do that would be worth that much to a company, but I have failed to come up with any rational, sane explanation for the grossly inflated salaries these people make.

Think about it. Some relaxed (from the generous holiday and vacation benefits) slightly overweight, middle-aged man wanders into an office five days a week. He goes to meetings and listens to people hired to give him expert advice. Then he makes decisions that will not, in any way, effect his earnings. Those decisions might bankrupt his company (think PWA buying out CP airlines). They might eventually throw tens of thousands of people out of work and lose investors millions and millions of dollars. They may cost workers large wage concessions to keep the company afloat. But, the CEO will not be held accountable.

That’s incredible. Any normal employee who screws up and costs their employer a few thousand dollars can expect the guillotine the next day.

Now, consider the other high-profile fat cats: professional athletes.

Hockey players are making seven, eight and nine million dollars a year. Basketball and soccer players are making ten to fifteen million dollars a year. Baseball players get 250 million-dollar contracts.

This is nuts, too.

These guys (and it is mostly guys) are playing a game for a living. They maybe put in 200 hours a year playing and 300 hours a year practicing. At most in a year, they put in what amounts to five months work for a regular worker.

I stood up for the players for a long time. I said it was better they got that money than the greedy owners. I pointed out how little athletes like Gordie Howe and Eric Nesterenko and even Guy Lafleur made in comparison to the team owners. But these salaries are so out of line with reality that I can’t defend them.

Now, consider Hollywood stars, fashion models, and plastic surgeons.

Regular working people – the millions of us who do the works to keep this society moving – have seen our real incomes decline steadily over the past twenty years. We make less in real dollars, while costs for essential services like health care and education keep going up and up. Most of the real decent people I know are having trouble making ends meet. Plant workers, bank tellers, retail clerks, farmers, meat packers, and health care workers are all suffering. Academics and artists and scientists and yes, even small business people are in the same boat. A bunch of largely unproductive people are getting rich while the rest of us sink into poverty.

I think we need to take a real good look at how the pie is getting divided in this country. It’s just plain wrong and it needs to be fixed. And I don’t think that any of those CEOs is going to fix it for us.