VIDEO: Runaway CEO Pay Is Bad for Our Economy, Bad for Democracy, and Bad for Business
As executive compensation packages reach all-time highs and CEOs now routinely make hundreds of times more than their average workers, Sarah Anderson tells the BBC that this runaway CEO pay is “bad for our economy, bad for democracy, and bad for business.”
These extreme gaps are “based on the foolish notion that the person in the corner office is somehow almost single-handedly responsible for corporate value,” while front line workers are “worth only a fraction of that,” she says.
“All of the research has shown that when you have those extreme gaps,” Sarah adds, “you tend to have lower morale, lower productivity, and higher turnover rates. So it’s bad for business and it’s not sustainable” for our economy — or our society.
“Too much money is being siphoned and extracted from workers who are doing tough jobs at lower levels of the pay scale and funneled up to the top, to the point where we have so much money concentrated in so few hands that it is a threat to our democracy.”
For example, “we have not had a raise in the minimum wage in the United States for over a decade,” Sarah points out. “Big corporate powers have blocked those small, modest steps to having a more equitably shared economy.”
Sarah says this is why we need higher tax rates on these bad corporate actors, an idea that enjoys strong public support.
“Pushing for policies to crack down on CEO pay would absolutely be a vote winner,” she tells the BBC. “I have spoken to groups in small towns in swing states” and “what I found was enormous common ground. Every poll is showing that this is a transpartisan issue. Across the political spectrum, people are just fed up.”
“It’s a very deeply entrenched, systemic problem,” Sarah concludes. “And it’s going to take public policy to change it.”
The full clip is available below.
