The contributors to the Minimum Wage Thread posited that "no job should be paid more nor less than it's worth".

So how about a Maximum Wage? Would anybody seriously suggest that any CEO is really worth a hundred million dollars a year? Wouldn't it seem reasonable to cap an individual's earning at some multiple of the minimum wage? Like maybe 500:1?

Is the CEO leading a Fortune 500 corporation really bringing ten thousand times the value of the guy emptying the wastepaper baskets?

Is the CEO leading a Fortune 500 corporation really bringing ten thousand times the value of the guy emptying the wastepaper baskets?

The short answer is yes, he is.

There should be a maximum wage, yes. Scrape a few million per annum off the CEO pay and distribute it so that the wastepaper basket emptier can have a living wage.

If I own a company lock, stock and barrel, what right does the government have to say I can't pay my employees, or myself, whatever I please? After all, its my company.

The moment you let the government in on this sort of decision, it opens up a pandora's box that just shouldn't be opened.

The short answer is yes, he is.
Exactly. Look at Chrysler. In the eighties the company was about to go belly up. Who saved it? Was it five hundred janitors? No. It was one man, Lee Iacocca. He was worth every penny he was paid.

There should be no minimum or maximum wage.

"Maximum wage" is an interesting idea. I sort of like it, but also like to avoid discontinuous onset in government modulation of private economic decisions. Fortunately, I can "have my cake, and eat it to" because US already has had for years, a progressive tax structure.

If it were revised with continuously changing brackets, (99% for the highest tax rate) we would effectively have a maximum wage. To further strength the force, the corporate tax deductibility of salaries could begin to diminish at some high level progressively to zero. Some one suggested 500 times the minimum wage, and that seems like a reasonable starting point for starting this "not fully deductible" in corporate taxes salary point. Perhaps the corporate deductibility goes to zero at 5000 times the minimum wage. Thus, the government's tax income from very high salary would be many times (hundreds) the salary received by the high-paid CEO etc. and could be used to provide better (free?) education etc. to the poor but qualified. He/she might even be proud of the greater contrubution being given to society. - (Compared to the value currently provided society and the company when he/she decides that blue is a more profitable color for selling toothbrushes or cars etc.) Everyone would benefit if all "good brains" were fully developed.

I don't think that CEOs should be able to make ten thousand times the wage of his/her workers. but I don't think the government should have any say in it. we as consumers have the power to change it, but we lack the solidarity.

besides, what is the incentive of building a super company if you can't get paid for it? these companies get as big as they are because people want their services.

no one should be allowed to make more than 5 million in one year. 1000X five thousand a year would be this. No one can live on 5K a year...
Think about this: a smart person would never have to work again making 5 mill in one year. PERIOD!
Why should anyone be allowed to take more than what is necessary to live? Why do people feel so compelled to be so selfish?
A thousand times the lowest person is five hundred times too much.
Instead of giving money towards these infamously rich families to breed more idiotic kids to spend money frivilously towards pointless schemes, there should be a cap. The excess should be given towards the families unable to make it comfortably. This WOULD solve our problem of throwing all our jobs overseas. More money for the lower end jobs (or cheaper payments to educate the public for the higher end ones) would make American made products cheaper overall.
Most of our problems in life are caused by selfishness. Should someone step in when one's selfishness affects everyone elses? My answer: Yes.

The wider gap between have and have nots, the more unstable society gets. Olygarchies are glued together either by rude force (see banana republics) or horse doze of propaganda and mind control + ruthless prison systems (see soon to be banana USA). Ultimately everything boils down to the question why in the hell do we need this society? So the few could make it more and more and more....... (rich and powerful want to get even richer and powerfuller, way beyond their consumption capacities, isn't it some kind of sickness?) Or we need the society where everybody had a shot on a decent, meaningfull existence, society where one doesn't need an "opportunity" (hate f*ckng word) to move up hierarchy ladder or rot. If choice is #1, sure, one can come come up with tonnes of demagogery why Mr. Lee should be more compensated than 400 janitors; Mr. Lee could be represented as a unique, one of a kind industry maverick with unique set of skills deserving that compensation. The truth is lots of those 400 janitors could do just as "well" given the "opportunity".

Recepies of "success" are well known, trained monkey could implement them: cut labor force, cut salaries/benefits, outsource, invest saved $ into brainwhashing marketing campaigns, deversify business by buying some credit card business, etc. It does take a genius to do that, actually Mr. Lee didn't actually do anything of the above himself, did he?

CEO bringing value, that's funniest statement. CEO (or any manager) is like a cerberus dog, barking off orders, doing nothing himself, and collecting dough no matter what. Some times it appears to me that manegerial caste is made in a clone factory, they are so alike.

It took hundreds years of brainwashing to represent those on higher ladders of the wealth piramide as more deserving humans. The bottom agrees or pretend to agree with that as long as the bone thrown down the ladder has some meat on it. The problem is that the top got greedy and throwing down more and more of bare bones and more and more of propaganda.

Not a poll, but seems to be currently 7 to 2 in favor curbing very high salaries (and bonus etc.), but only I have suggested a means for doing so, which is only a slight technical modification of existing IRS taxes schedules. (not much new administratively.)

What do you think of my plan, or do you have a better idea? (Two posting here, obviously want undo at least some, if not all, of the progressive tax table, not increase the steepness and upper limit of it as I am suggessting, so this request for comments is to the other 7 or new comers.)

Some sensible person who is lost in history once put this into numbers. He maintained that a fair society with a robust economy could exist within the paradigm that in any organization the lowest paid employee must make at least ten percent of the salary of the highest paid employee.

You've got a CEO "earning" a million dollars a year? Wow, that company must be a model of corporate efficiency and success. Surely it could afford to pay all the janitors $100K. Think what a boost that would be for the local economy, environment, schools, etc.

You really can't afford to pay janitors more than $50K? Well that's generous enough I suppose. But if money is that tight, the CEO really isn't worth more than half a million. That is certainly generous enough for that level of performance.

Maybe you'd quibble over the exact formula, which I'm sure was scratched out on the back of a napkin. Make it a factor of twenty instead of ten. It's still a nice idea.

Of course something like this would never work as a law, at least not in a place like the USA. But it would be nice if the people with those seven- and eight-figure incomes would have more social conscience about the people on their payroll who literally can't make ends meet on what they're being paid. It's a crying shame when a couple has to hold down three or four jobs between them to be able to afford raising two children.

...It's a crying shame when a couple has to hold down three or four jobs between them to be able to afford raising two children. I agree. Also "crying shame" they are too tired to change the system. At least they can find time to vote, but they do not use that power effectively as nothing changes.

I do not know the answer to this problem, but hope that the internet and forums like this can get some movements going. Let’s reform tax laws to make them much simpler, and perhaps structure the progressive tax differently as I suggested in this thread, to provide some relief. Also a little circulation of my post in thread "How DUMB can US Voter be?" in Politics forum, suggesting how to reduce taxes, cost of driving and contain the coming increase of food prices as more US crop land is converted to corn for fuel would be useful, I think.

I don't think that CEOs should be able to make ten thousand times the wage of his/her workers. but I don't think the government should have any say in it. we as consumers have the power to change it, but we lack the solidarity.

Workers are allowed to unionize and demand better conditions.

But the skills of a janitor are cheap and easy to come by. People are paid what they're worth. Those who figure out how to make million dollar salaries deserve it.

Costco's head honchos only make 30x as much as the lowest work or something. In AK, starting wage for a Costco employee is like $10.35/hour and they get benefits after 3 months employment.

...Costco's head honchos only make 30x as much as the lowest work or something. In AK, starting wage for a Costco employee is like $10.35/hour and they get benefits after 3 months employment.Thanks for this information. I like that policy so will try to shop there when I can.

Having the CEO and other leaders taking less out of the company surely helps it prosper, all other thing being equal, but all other things are not equal. Clearly this Costco CEO is not looking out for "no. 1" but Cosco. this attitude probably reflects in his (her?) other decisions also. In not too surprising contrast, a CEO who is looking out for "no 1" will take as much as he can for him self and make sure that if things go wrong he has a "golden parachute." This obviously directly prejudice the company and probably more seriously indirectly hurts it more as his real concern is not for the company. For example, he may rapidly "grow" the company with unwise acquisition, cooked the books, etc to make him self look good. A few will even throw big parties for their friends, especially Other CEOs they want to impress, (or in one famous recent case, all this plus nearly million dollars of company money for wife's birthday, a personal plane and $10,000 shower curtain) Thus it is reasonable to expect a NEGATIVE correlation between very high CEO benefits taken out of the company and the success of the company, and than with exceptions, seems to be the case.

For example, Ford and GM are in competition to see which would go bankrupt first. GM was the clear leader in 2005 as it lost more market share and 10 BILLION DOLLARS, but Ford is catching up in 2006. Their CEOs are among the highest paid, but as GM was so clearly headed for bankruptcy, its CEO (guy who made all those bad decisions about inefficient SUVs etc.) did take a small pay cot of a few million dollars.

Please someone who thinks "they are worth every penny of it" etc. explain to me why when there is both in theory, and in practice, a negative correlation between CEO salary and company prosperity? Sure it is possible to find exceptions, but the CEOs of the major bankrupting companies are usually very well paid and exit with their golden parachute, leaving people without the retirement income or the job they were counting on. - Ask anyone who worked at Enron, now or the ex Ford and GM workers in 2008. actually in a few months when the euphoira of the big bribe about 10,000 GM Delco subsiderary workers just got to retire, is spent, you can ask them sooner.

no one should be allowed to make more than 5 million in one year. 1000X five thousand a year would be this. No one can live on 5K a year...


Who makes $5000/year? If you worked full time at minimum wage you would make over $10000/year.

While we are "concentrated" on the CEO's wages, we forget that they are just hired hands for top 1% class of investors who simply do NOTHING to own nearly everything. And as sure as hell, they deserve every penny they get. Too bad (for us), even though some of us agree that "they deserve", investor class strongly disagrees with that and wants even more.

After all if they can get it, they deserve it. If a thief can get away with roberry, he deserves every penny of loot.

Workers are allowed to unionize and demand better conditions.

Business owners are allowed to move businesses to distant places where unions, to put it mildly, are very unlikely. In rare cases when a business cannot be moved, businesses owners have lots of antiunion cards in their sleeves + full backing of state and money bags. Workers, on the other hands, have only disadvantages behind their backs.

But the skills of a janitor are cheap and easy to come by.

Compensation (for mere mortals) doesn't have anything to do with "skills", it have lots to do with supply and demand of people "willing" to do the job. From my experience, postdoctoral salaries are fairly close to the janitorial ones even though one needs 10 years or so of college to be a postdoc.

On the upper levels, supply and demand doesn't work though. Technical szmoozing, being a part of a "close circle" are way more important. After all how many people could send a company down the drain and enjoy their golden parachute? Billions, I guess. However, only few will be chosen to do just that.

People are paid what they're worth. Those who figure out how to make million dollar salaries deserve it.

Define the word "worth". How that worth is measured? If worth = money, than to paraphrase your statement: "people are paid what they are paid". Which is quite profound thought :)

Pay is correlated with one's position in the social hierarchy. Those on the top usually decide what they are worth ($). Those on the bottom, accept somebody's else decisions (yeah, I know they could run rat race and become leeches themselves).

You statement could slightly resemble reality if society you live in, corporations you work at were meritocracy, where worth/position on the ladder = merit (virtue, contributions, ..) . However, it's not the case. Virtue is the last way to try to get to the top. All you can hope to get with your hard work, qualifications, etc. is a position of a fairly compensated work horse. That's it. "Maverics" on the very top, who will toss you around, will posses quite different set of "skills" (and/or be born into a top position) that that of a "work horse".

Chelsea graduated from Stanford University with a degree in history in 2001; her undergraduate thesis was on her father's mediation of the 1998 Northern Ireland peace agreement. She went on to earn a Master's degree at University College, Oxford University in international relations.

In 2003, she joined the consulting firm McKinsey & Company in New York City, reportedly earning a six-figure salary.

For an inner city kid to follow steps of Ms. Clinton, he/she needs to be a genius with gigantic fists, incredible energy, etc. And even then, he couldn't count on 6 figures fresh out of college :)

Boy! was my memory wrong when I said that CEOs of GM had bribed 10,000 workers to quit. (This will not fixed their high paid miss management of course, but with rapidly droppin market shair they do not need the large work force. This reduction will make the banrupcy more simple, so yes I guess they are worth every penny they are paid. :rolleyes: I also bet they are checking their golden parachutes to make sure they are well packed, with "goodies" course.) Here are the facts, sort of a "No foreigners required" outsourcing move. (Following from a Forbes report):

General Motors (GM $28 1) said about 35,000 hourly workers, or
about 30% of its hourly workforce, agreed to accept buyouts,
topping the automaker's goal of 30,000. GM said that the
better-than-expected participation in the program will help it
realize cost savings of $8 billion annually versus its goal of $7
billion and reach its target of cutting manufacturing jobs about
two years ahead of schedule.

Delphi (DPHIQ $2) announced that 12,600 workers, or 38% of hourly
workers, agreed to accept the bankrupt auto parts maker's early
retirement program, which was also ahead of estimates. GM's CEO
Rick Wagoner said the large number of workers who accepted the
buyout represents a "big step" toward negotiating a labor
agreement for Delphi's workers. A work stoppage at the company
could cripple General Motors.

If I own a company lock, stock and barrel, what right does the government have to say I can't pay my employees, or myself, whatever I please? After all, its my company.

The moment you let the government in on this sort of decision, it opens up a pandora's box that just shouldn't be opened.

I suppose so. It seems strange, though, that the stockholders stand for it. After all, when the CEO is sucking capital out of the company its gonna hurt the long-term health of any company.

Personally, I would be pretty ashamed to be pulling down 50 million a year or whatever while I was cutting workers and closing factories. That's what it seems to come down to - these guys have no shame.

I suppose so. It seems strange, though, that the stockholders stand for it...The corporate structure is such that thousand of small share holders can do nothing, unless they happen to hold a balance between to inter forces struggling for control. They can not ever get together to resist the abuses the management can and does make upon the company as you can not get list of shareholder names and addresses. Even if you could typical share holder could not reasonably afford the postage etc. All they can do is get their resolution on that annual meeting agenda, but without being able to organized and management recommending against it, it has the snowball's chance in that hot place.

Clockwood and other followers of Ann Rand (keep gov completely out of the economy) would let a battery plant drain the acid from recycled batteries into the public water supply if that was the cheapest dump for it. They seem to think that no government regulation for the social good is desirable. If that is not his position (although that is his statement of it) then it is a question to be decided, not by the CEO, but by the law, what regulations are desired.

Personally, I would be pretty ashamed to be pulling down 50 million a year or whatever while I was cutting workers and closing factories. That's what it seems to come down to - these guys have no shame.
You close factories and lay off workers when you aren't making a profit from them. You can have billions of dollars tucked away but it would still be heinously stupid to keep running a moneypit when you aren't getting anything out of it. A few million dollars leached off by the corporation's leader shouldn't effect which factories close one iota.

You close factories and lay off workers when you aren't making a profit from them. You can have billions of dollars tucked away but it would still be heinously stupid to keep running a moneypit when you aren't getting anything out of it. A few million dollars leached off by the corporation's leader shouldn't effect which factories close one iota.The point is not that the high salaries of the CEOs etc represent the major expense of big operation like GM.

No, the point is why should they get anything (except fired) for making such bad decisons that make the company go bankrupt. If they were treated the same as factory worker who damage three cars because he was angry at his wife, they to would be out of they by close of busininess, but no they are in control so they get a pay raise and golden parachute for damagin the whole dam factory!

Its hard to make an american factory outcompete foreign companies with seemingly infinite supplies of slave labor and governments that do everything in their power to crush foreign competition. I don't know what CEO you want to pull automakers out of the fire, but he had better either be the reincarnation of Ghengis Khan or someone with a direct line to god.

Business owners are allowed to move businesses to distant places where unions, to put it mildly, are very unlikely.

Businesses can only do that when their businesses will thrive in distant places. Putting together pieces of cloth all day isn't exactly hard to come by labor. Supply of such labor is very high– just about anyone can sew with hardly any training.

Its hard to make an american factory outcompete foreign companies with seemingly infinite supplies of slave labor and governments that do everything in their power to crush foreign competition. ... Nonsense! Not the point again. Toyota and Honda are made in USA gaining market share and making a profit.

Their CEOs are more reasonably paid (as are all most all of non-US companies). The US's SEC and government in general are setup for the wealthy, not to serve the general public, so fact many US CEOs are looking out for "No. 1" instead of the company and stockholders is not surprising or difficult to achieve under US laws.

Actually US current government is destroying the US (dollar and economy) for the benefit of the big campaign contributors such as oil companies and farm agri-business. For example, using your taxes for farm subsidies so you can pay more for your food than if you were importing more from low cost producers. The 54cent import duty, quotas in case that does not stop imports, and 51 cents per gallon subsidy to US alcohol producers, the farm subsidy (2 billion of tax dollars, mainly to ADM and Cargill, annually) to corn growers all combine to:

(1)increase your taxes, and
(2) make the cost of driving your car about 40% higher than need be with imported alcohol, and
(3) as more area is converted to corn for alcohol production in US, your cost of food will be increasing also.

More on this in thread "How Stupid can US voters be?"

The contributors to the Minimum Wage Thread posited that "no job should be paid more nor less than it's worth".

So how about a Maximum Wage? Would anybody seriously suggest that any CEO is really worth a hundred million dollars a year? Wouldn't it seem reasonable to cap an individual's earning at some multiple of the minimum wage? Like maybe 500:1?

Is the CEO leading a Fortune 500 corporation really bringing ten thousand times the value of the guy emptying the wastepaper baskets?

don't they have maximum wage in japan?

don't they have maximum wage in japan?I do not know. Are you implying they do? Or just asking?

One thing is clear, the Japanese CEO is more humble and even apologizes for his company not doing well under his leadership, perhaps even resigns.

More news about how high paid US CEOs are "worth every penny of it"
(from: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060629/bs_nm/autos_ford_paper_dc)

Since Ford detailed in January its "Way Forward" restructuring campaign to make North American auto operations profitable again by 2008, industry conditions have got tougher than Ford planned for.

He {Bill Ford, CEO of Ford} said sales of sport utility vehicles had declined faster than planned for amid higher fuel prices and that prices of metals, plastics and other materials had also risen faster.

"I think we had some fairly conservative assumptions in the Way Forward plan, just because the world never develops like you think it is going to, and the world has gotten tougher," he said.

The paper quoted him as saying the turnaround plan was ahead of schedule when it comes to reducing headcount and that he anticipated 12,000 hourly workers will depart this year, largely through buyouts.

But the consumer exodus from SUVs* in favor of smaller cars was occurring at a faster pace than forecast, he said. "If that pace continues, that is tough for us."

{Billy T comment: that "us" is a nice touch. :rolleyes: Does this mean all losing their jobs have a golden parachute also. :D LOL}
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*Even the dumb US voters are not entirley stupid. SEE thread: "How DUMB can US voters Be?" for more on this.