Germany May Seek Cap on CEO Pay

I'd love to see this happen here:

Expatica ^ | July 21, 2004 | Staff

Germany may seek cap on CEO pay

21 July 2004

BERLIN - The German government is not ruling out legislation to impose limits on salaries and benefits paid to top corporate executives, a justice ministry spokeswoman said Wednesday. German corporate salaries are presently set under a self-governing corporate code, said the spokeswoman. Although German executive salaries are lower than in countries such as the United States there has been growing public anger over benefits enjoyed by CEOs despite three years of German economic stagnation with unemployment over 10 percent. "If progress is not as would be wished over the next year lawmakers may be forced to take action," said the spokeswoman. But she underlined there was so far no consideration on what regulations would be included in any such law. A former head of Germany's Daimler-Benz - now DaimlerChrysler - Edzard Reuter, said in an interview that the government would have to intervene if private business failed to come up with a reasonable solution to this issue. High salaries "cannot be ethically justified," said Reuter in a Deutschlandfunk radio interview.

..with a link to some sort of interperations software??? Give all our horror stories to be picked up by the Germans?? :shrug:

ben and jerry's tried something similar and profits dove off a cliff...I recall hearing about another "socially responsible" clothes manufacturer in new york doing the same thing...they went bankrupt last week. If you want someone that knows how to manage a large organization, you need to pay up.

and apparently was incompetent.

one out of 30,000 corporations in America..

Savings and Loans such as BCCI
Insurance Industries

...potentially a Salary Cap, if it were to be implemented (and I don't yet know how I feel about it...it is too controlling and yet, we have been forced into it...so I am still pondering this and still forming my beliefs), would be the Law of the Land and so every CEO would be subject.

But there are several issues here and one is that Top market Value would be earned by many CEOs.

Still, watching jerks who run their company into the ground make the same is also disconcerting.

In fact, the reverse seems to me to be much more likely to be true. If there were a cap on CEO salaries that would tend to level the playing field. if the playing field is leveled, then CEO's would be more likely to work for companies for reasons other than how much the could potentially plunder- such as doing something they really cared about and believed in, or living in a city that they'd prefer to be in. Moreover, if salaries were capped, it would remove some of the incentive to raid pension plans and would lessen some of the pressure for layoffs.

to look at. Still, I think we live in such a greedy culture that I am not sure we can pull it off. The workers at the bottom who would most benefit from that sort of thing scream loudest about infringing on the rights of the CEOs. But only because they secretly think they will BE one of those CEOs one day and so they are protecting their future assets.

The American dream has turned into a nightmare. :eyes:

and we woke up serfs. Welcome to the dark ages.