There’s Always Money for the Boss

Businesses always find big bucks for the boss. He wants a raise; he gets it. No problem. For workers whose sweat of the brow produces profits, well, somehow there’s never a cent for them.

In fact, last week when President Obama proposed making more workers eligible for overtime pay, fat cats and CEO sycophants expressed abject horror that companies may have to pay employees more when they work more.

No way could they pay, they protested! The proposed rule would bankrupt America, they raged. It’s not humanly possible, they fumed, for corporations that pad CEO paychecks with millions in bonuses to also manage to pay time and a half when workers labor more than 40 hours a week. Can’t be done, they cried! "

*Still, highly profitable corporations are complaining. The National Retail Federation, the group that opposes all minimum wage increases, said “there’s no magic pot of money,” from which to pay overtime.

There is, however, always a big fat magic pot load of money to pay CEOs.

In 1965, CEOs at the nation’s 350 largest public firms made 20 times the pay of a typical worker employed by those companies. After the 1970s, however, worker pay stalled while CEO pay supersized. Since 1979, the compensation of the top 1 percent grew 138 percent while the wages of the bottom 90 percent rose just 15 percent. Now those CEOs get 300 times the typical worker’s pay. CEOs at the top 350 companies in 2013 pulled down an average of $15.2 million a year, up 21.7 percent since 2010.

CEOs have long argued that they are so great and so valuable and so special that they deserve to get in a day what a worker earns in a year. But a 2013 report by the Institute for Policy Studies smacks that down. The researchers found that nearly 40 percent of the highest paid CEOs over the past 20 years were eventually bailed out, booted or busted.

That is, taxpayers came to the rescue of their companies, corporate boards fired the CEOs or investigators charged them."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=26&v=hWY9xD6rxnE

http://ourfuture.org/20150707/theres-always-money-for-the-boss