Sunday, February 16, 2014

Former CEO Spills the Beans

Former AT&T Broadband CEO Leo Hindery  pointed out that, even as CEO pay has skyrocketed in recent decades, it has not "trickled down" to workers, who must increasingly borrow money to finance their spending.

Fortune 500 CEOs now make more than 200 times what their average workers make, according to Bloomberg data. That ratio has increased by 1,000 percent since 1950. As CEO pay has exploded, worker pay has stagnated: Workers have not had a real cost-of-living increase since the 1960s, Hindery argued.

And these CEOs are not exactly earning their exorbitant pay, said Hindery. "It's a fraud," the former executive said. "It's born out of cronyism."

The problem, Hindery said, isn't just that the rich are getting richer. The tragedy, he said, is the rise of the low-wage workforce. Half of the jobs created in the past three years have been low-paying while the wealthiest Americans continue to capture record earnings.

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