We already know about the millions of dollars in compensation CEOs rake in while workers take cuts in pay and benefits to help the company, but the CEOs who slashed their payrolls the deepest took home 42 percent more compensation than the year’s chief executive pay average for S&P 500 companies, according to the 17th annual executive compensation survey by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS).
Despite headlines in newspapers that poor CEO’s are seeing cuts in pay the last two years, executive pay overall remains far above inflation adjusted levels of years past. In fact, after adjusting for inflation, CEO pay in 2009 more than doubled the CEO pay average for the decade of the 1990s, more than quadrupled the CEO pay average for the 1980s, and ran approximately eight times the CEO average for all the decades of the mid-20th century.
In fact, in 1965 the average CEO was earning 24 times what the average worker was making, but that has jumped to 263 times at a time when workers are making concession in wages and benefits to make a company solvent. CEOs are sacrificing nothing.
According to the IPS, American workers, by contrast, are taking home less in real weekly wages than they took home in the 1970s. But we don’t need a report to know that.
For their sacrifice, workers are shown the door, and, unfortunately, layoffs and offshoring jobs to Third World countries is how CEOs feather their already opulent nests and the only place they ever look to cut costs.
That’s how Republican Gubernatorial nominee and Chief Executive Outsourcer (CEO) Rick Snyder make a cool $23.7 million when he left Gateway Computers after he shipped 20,000 American jobs to China and other parts of Asia.
But Snyder isn’t spending those millions of yachts, cars or airplanes; he is spending his on buying the governorship of Michigan, just like the former GOP Gubernatorial nominee the Amway Guy Dick DeVos tried to do in 2006 and failed.
The post-primary campaign finance reports were filed on Thursday, and they showed Snyder spent $7.6 million to win his party's gubernatorial primary, $6.1 million of which came from his own deep pockets, earned for cutting jobs; chump change. He spent more money that the other four GOP candidates combined.
Vote for Virg Bernero in November; a man who has actually created jobs here in Michigan
