Jim Hightower / OtherWords
JUN 25, 2019 OPINION
Congratulations on that nice
pay raise you got last year. A 7 percent hike — wow!
After 40 years of stagnant
wages, that uptick should help you pay off some of old credit card bills or get
an upgrade on your 10-year-old pickup.
Oh, wait… you say you didn’t
get such a raise?
Oops, my mistake. It was the
CEOs of corporate giants who reported to the
Associated Press that they enjoyed a median jump of 7 percent last
year. And, since their paychecks were already king-size, that amounted to an
extra $800,000 in their take-home, jacking up their total yearly income to $12
million each.
Bear in mind that “median”
means half of the corporate bosses grabbed more than 7 percent. For
example, David Zaslav, honcho of the Discovery television network, got a 207
percent boost in pay, raising his total take in 2018 to $130 million.
These lavish payouts to
top-floor bosses, combined with a miserliness toward rank-and-file employees
who actually produce the corporate wealth, is creating an untenable income
disparity, stretching inequality in our Land of Egalitarianism to the snapping
point. The pay gap between aloof CEOs and typical employees nearly doubled last
year at a range of corporate giants, from PayPal to CVS — and it tripled at
Discovery.
AP’s recent survey found that
compensation inequality is now so extreme that a middle-wage employee at most
major corporations would have to work 158 years to make as much as his or her
chief executive was given last year alone. To amass as much pay as Zaslav
pocketed in 2018, a typical Discovery employee would have to work 989 years!
When you hear corporate
chieftains gloat that our economy is “booming,” ask yourself: A boom for whom?
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