I do see the value in paying high performing individuals but there has to be some moderation even in that. The CEO pay gap is now obscene.
The CEO pay gap in the US was 399x that of the average worker! that is ludicrous! What that means is that if that company cut the pay for the CEO by half, it would leave enough money on the table to pay about 200 new hires at the average salary - which may bring down the number of hours each person currently works.. or if you decide to just pay employees a bit more, they may be able to meet their expenses a lot easier.
It is indicative that the boards and the CEOs are extremely self-serving. If you believe the company is doing well, reward the employees more than yourself. That is what ethical human beings do.
To quote the article above:
“Businesses are mostly rational actors that pay what they need to, to find the right talent. On the other hand, the US differential exceeds other sophisticated economies by far,” Professor Bailey says. “Why in Europe and other economically evolved economies, is this differential so much less? In Switzerland -- one of the richest countries in the world -- the difference is $150 to $1. Our salary gap between executives and workers isn't in sync with the rest of the world.”
It's not measuring CEO pay to median employee, it's "The CEOs at America’s largest low-wage employers". So they basically looked at the largest companies that paid the lowest wages.
CEO pay tends to align quite well with not just performance, but also company size. Would you expect a CEO of a low wage company that has revenues of $10B to be paid more than the CEO of a similar company with $100M in revenues? I would. Larger companies are more complex, the CEO is managing a lot more employees, the stakes are higher and you'd like hire a very different CEO for a $10B a year company versus a $100M a year company. Hence, you'd normally expect that larger companies would have a higher ratio of CEO to lowest paid employee.
That is likely one factor in why the US stands out compared to Europe. The country USA was compared to was Switzerland! A country that is 41x smaller than the US.
And look at the top Swiss companies by revenue [1]. They are commodity trading companies! They were likely entirely excluded from the analysis.
But the point stands - what is the right ratio? 100x? 50x? Should it be exactly the same for every company? Why link pay solely to the lowest employee wage and ignore all the other factors - size of the company, revenues, profits, median employee wages, wage distribution, etc?
I think this is a larger discussion and not limited to just a conversation about the pay a CEO gets.
Well, of course, a CEO's pay is indicative of what board considers as the CEO's contribution towards the bottomline/topline vs the contribution of all employees and when a CEO's pay is so much higher than that of other employees, it is in a sense, a statement that devalues the contribution of other employees.
Given that most boards are full of top-tier executives from other organizations, clearly it is in their narrow interests to favor high payouts to CEOs. But that is also indicative of a very high sense of entitlement and so the question is not - what should the ratio be? the question should really be - is the CEO really a team player? and does he/she value the team they have setup and if so how do they honour the team when the company does well and how will they as a team deal with a situation when there is a big downturn in the company?
I am not at all arguing for a socialist/communist type of mindset - but there is a point at which the sense of entitlement that CEOs feel that does damage to their own teams in ways that they don't realise. And I say this as someone who is a CEO.
> How is that? The board sets the CEO salary, not the other employees.
If you pay someone disproportionately higher than others in the same team, what message are you sending to others in the team? When a CEO goes with that decision, they are devaluing their own team
I would say there are a ton of factors that influence how much a CEO gets paid.
I worked for a large corporation and the CEO makes at least 100x what I do, but she is also running a company of 150,000 employees, so I don't feel devalued at all. I'm paid quite well.
100x is nothing these days. Now the ratio is 399:1 or thereabouts.. and often even higher. Of course, there is no perfect ratio - but there is a point at which it becomes obscene. It varies from organization to organization.
The CEO pay gap in the US was 399x that of the average worker! that is ludicrous! What that means is that if that company cut the pay for the CEO by half, it would leave enough money on the table to pay about 200 new hires at the average salary - which may bring down the number of hours each person currently works.. or if you decide to just pay employees a bit more, they may be able to meet their expenses a lot easier.