Too many large corporations have become nothing more than cash cows to be milked by management. When, for instance, one person retires from a health care organization with $1.7 billion dollars, it is obvious that his management was not about providing health insurance, but about amassing monstrous personal wealth. Nobody is worth 1.7 billion dollars.
We used to speak of a ratio of income between a factory-floor worker, and top management. We had become used to thinking that if a worker earned $40,000. a year, perhaps the CEO might be worth--let us say--ten times that: $400,000. In some countries, even six times an average worker's salary is considered excessive. We have gotten to the place at which the ratio are themselves so large that they can scarcely be comprehended.
It is worse than that. It is that management siphons off hundreds of millions a year, and ordinary workers are being laid off, or having their wages cut. We have very nearly given up on the notion, not of pay equality, but of pay equity; of there being a long, continuous scale from the lowest wages, to top salaries. We are becoming a nation in which it is acceptable for their to be a very wealthy class, and a very beleagered class. When that happens, the middle class discovers that they are sliding very quickly into the beleagered class.
A healthy society has to have an equitable distribution of wealth. Much of the political unrest, of the willingness to entertain wild and nearly insane theories about what is going on today, are due to a huge segment of our population slipping toward poverty, and a whole middle class afraid it is only a few paychecks away from losing their homes and jobs.
Politically, what we are seeing is a fierce defense of the privilege of being wealthy, seriously, filthy wealthy, and scorn for the condition of people out of work, or people working for survival-level wages.
Only pure greed can explain why people with political and monetary power cannot see that economic fairness is a condition for a stable and healthy society.
We used to speak of a ratio of income between a factory-floor worker, and top management. We had become used to thinking that if a worker earned $40,000. a year, perhaps the CEO might be worth--let us say--ten times that: $400,000. In some countries, even six times an average worker's salary is considered excessive. We have gotten to the place at which the ratio are themselves so large that they can scarcely be comprehended.
It is worse than that. It is that management siphons off hundreds of millions a year, and ordinary workers are being laid off, or having their wages cut. We have very nearly given up on the notion, not of pay equality, but of pay equity; of there being a long, continuous scale from the lowest wages, to top salaries. We are becoming a nation in which it is acceptable for their to be a very wealthy class, and a very beleagered class. When that happens, the middle class discovers that they are sliding very quickly into the beleagered class.
A healthy society has to have an equitable distribution of wealth. Much of the political unrest, of the willingness to entertain wild and nearly insane theories about what is going on today, are due to a huge segment of our population slipping toward poverty, and a whole middle class afraid it is only a few paychecks away from losing their homes and jobs.
Politically, what we are seeing is a fierce defense of the privilege of being wealthy, seriously, filthy wealthy, and scorn for the condition of people out of work, or people working for survival-level wages.
Only pure greed can explain why people with political and monetary power cannot see that economic fairness is a condition for a stable and healthy society.
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