It’s hard for many younger people to believe that it wasn’t always like this.
Big corporate CEOs taking home salaries so astronomical that most people can’t even imagine what that kind of paycheque looks like.
The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives released their annual report this week analyzing what the top 100 of Canada’s CEOs were paid in 2014. The numbers are, well, almost numbing. Each one took home an average of $8.96 million, and the very top ones took home a whole heap more than that. At the apex of the money mountain was BlackBerry CEO John Chen whose compensation totalled $89.7 million. It’s enough to choke an elephant, let alone a horse.
The most sobering part of the report, though, is the comparison.
They calculate that a typical full-year, full-time worker earned $48,636 last year (a generous number for many workers struggling to make ends meet). The gulf becomes even more clear with the painful truth that Canada’s top 100 CEOs will have already earned that amount by the time you’re reading this. In fact, it only took them until about noon on Monday to hit your full salary for the entire year.
Well, why shouldn’t they take home big paydays, you may ask? They work hard, right?
A lot of people work hard. We’d bet that most of the people reading this paper work hard. With no hope of ever earning even a decent fraction of that wage. Which wouldn’t be so hard to swallow if wages for the average worker hadn’t stagnated or gone down over the past dozen years or so, while CEO compensation at America’s largest firms is at least 10 times more than it was just 30 years ago. This according to the Economic Policy Institute. It’s the growth of the disparity that’s so shocking.
The CEO-to-worker compensation ratio was 20 to one in 1965, but in 2014 had increased to 303 to one. From 1978 to 2014 CEO compensation, adjusted for inflation, rose 997 per cent, while the typical worker’s compensation rose only 10.9 per cent.
Thinking that profits should be shared around more equitably doesn’t make you a commie or a die-hard socialist, it just makes you someone who recognizes a trickle-up effect that’s benefited the very few at the expense of everyone else.
This kind of wealth gap doesn’t help our economy, it hurts it. The rich have so much cash they can’t even hope to spend it in a dozen lifetimes. When more people make a decent wage, there’s more people spending on more diverse goods. That’s just basic common sense.
It’s time to figure out how things went so haywire.