Amid Record Pay, CEOs Aren’t Celebrating

from Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality:


Amid Record Pay, CEOs Aren’t Celebrating
October 26, 2013

America’s top execs don’t have the time to party. They’re too busy waging a corporate holy war against what may be the most promising check yet on executive pay excess.

By Sam Pizzigati


In 1930, an obscure lawsuit against Bethlehem Steel unearthed a piece of corporate data that would quickly outrage Great Depression-era America. Bethlehem CEO W. R. Grace, Americans learned, had grabbed $1.6 million in personal compensation the year before.

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Over the next four decades, executive pay in America would essentially stagnate. In effect, points out historian Harwell Wells, corporations observed an unofficial $1 million limit on annual CEO compensation. No major firms dared exceed that limit — and risk the public furor exceeding the limit would surely bring.

But CEO pay would start rising again, slowly in the 1970s and then much more rapidly in the 1980s, as some of the dominant pressures that had restrained excessive compensation — most notably, a strong trade union presence and high federal tax rates on high incomes — began to melt away.

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That fear is driving the massive — and borderline hysterical — lobbying campaign that corporate power suits are now waging against a provision of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

This particular provision, the law’s section 953(b), requires corporations to annually reveal the ratio between what they pay their top execs and what they pay their most typical workers. ...................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://toomuchonline.org/amid-record-pay-ceos-arent-celebrating/#sthash.dOxYI9s2.dpuf