The exaggerated salaries of great executives
I have read an article by Indigo Olivier in The Guardian on the salaries of executives in large companies. The information has been obtained from the Economic Policy Institute, which is a North American think-tank independent of any political party.
According to data from this institute, the average salary in the USA of the great executives (CEO’s) is 351 times that of the workers of their companies, when years ago in 1965 it was 15 times.
I do not know if the proportion of 15 is adequate, but it is clear to me that more than 300 times is totally disproportionate.
Continuing with the institute’s data, from 1978 to the present, the salary increase of top executives has been 1,322%, while that of workers has been 18%
For my reflection today, I am not much concerned with the precision of the numbers, but with the concept of what has happened in North American society, and also in that of the rest of the industrialized countries such as Spain.
The wage differentials between those who earn more and those who earn less have increased disproportionately and abusively, and today we live in a society in which the middle class is disappearing and turning into the poor class.
Consequence of all this: few rich people who are getting richer, and more poor people who are getting poorer.
Something similar happens in Spain and elsewhere. CEO’s of large companies also earn more than 200 times of that of one of their workers, with the difficulty of knowing precisely what they are getting due to the “bonuses” of stocks and similar tricks.
And this happens because these people have enormous power when it comes to assigning their salaries to themselves, and because the Society does not rebel against these injustices. We are stupefied with our cell phones publishing nonsense on social networks, without giving too much thought to the important things that are happening around us, and we do not see how our society is changing for the worse.
We are all different and I understand that there must be differences in salaries based on the added value contributed by each one, but those differences must be within limits that allow everyone to live with dignity.
The “everything for me” of the current CEO’s is not acceptable and every day we get closer to the “homo homini lupus” of the Romans.
After all, technological development is not doing us much good.
A shame !!
