Hi Howard, just musing.....
Recent findings shed new light on the increasing unequal terrain of American society. Starting at the top most would think or at least hope that the company leadership operated as a team or depending upon your point of view, a pack or gang---each getting his fair share of the take. Bu no, the rising tied of executive pay does not lift all yachts equally. The latest pay gap is the one between the CEO and his or possibly her third in command.
According a study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Federal Reserve thirty to forty years ago the CEOs of major companies received 80 percent more, on average, thn the third-highest-paid executives. By the early part of the twenty-first century the gap between the CRO and the third in command had swollen to 260 percent.
Now take a look at what is happening at the other end of the spectrum. In May 2007, a millionaire couple in a Long Island suburb was charged with keeping two Indonesian domestics as slaves for five years, during which the women were paid $100 a month, fed very little, forced to sleep on mats on the floor, and subjected to beatings, cigarette burns, and other torments.
This is not an isolated case. If the new top involves tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, a private jet, the new bottom is slavery. Some of America's slaves are captive domestics like the Indonesian women on Long Island. Others are sweatshop or restaurant workers or department store employees.
CEOs and slaves the two ends of the American economic spectrum. In universities you have top-ranked professors receiving salaries of several hundred thousand a year, augmented by consulting fees and earnings from their patents while at the other end you have as one story was reported a professor who commuted to his classes from a homeless shelter and others who moonlight as waitresses or cleaning ladies.
In the legal profession where law firm partners bill hundreds of dollars an hour have a group of "temp" lawyers working for less than $25 an hour. According to a story in American Lawyer, a legal temp at a major New York firm reported being "corralled in a windowless basement room littered with dead cockroaches" where six of the seven exist were blocked.
The CEO presumably depends on his fellow executives, as does the star professor relies on adjuncts to do his or her teaching, as does the law firm partner is enriched by the sweated labor of legal temps. For all we know some of those CEOs go home to sip their single malts in mahogany-walled dens that have been cleaned by domestic slaves.
Why do those at the top find it hard if not impossible to graciously acknowledge their dependency of the labor of others?
The New York Times pointed out that as long as the middle class is still trudging along and the poor are not starving in the streets what does it matter if the superrich are absorbing an ever-larger share of national income?
In the article the New York Times concluded that "whether Roger Clemens, who at one time earned $10,000 for every pitch he threw, earned 100 times or 200 times what the average middle class individual earned is not relevant. As long as the middle class individual's children have medical care and they go to decent schools it is not the rich people who are pulling away at the top that are the problem."
Well, yes they are. An excessively reimbursed over class can drag down an economy as surely as a swelling underclass.
The Clements example distracts from the reality that a great deal of the wealth at the top is built on the low wage labor of the poor. Take Wal-Mart, the largest private employer and premiere exploiter of the working class. Every year four or five of the people on the Forbes magazine's list of twenty riches Americans carry the surname Walton, meaning they are the children, nieces, and nephews of Sam Walton, Wal-Mart founder. Is it a coincidence their union-busting low-wage empire happens to have generated a family fortune that is approaching $100 million?
The over class bids up the price of goods that ordinary people also need---housing for example. The urban poor are being dispersed into overcrowded suburban ranch houses while the billionaires' horse farms displace the rural poor and the middle class. Similarly, the rich can swallow tuitions upwards of $50,000, making college education increasingly a privilege of the upper classes.
Hugh concentration of wealth at the top is routinely used to tilt the political process in favor of the wealthy. If we do not have universal health care insurance it may well turnout to be because Hillary Clinton is reported to be the number-one Congressional recipient of donations from the health care industry. Who demanded the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy---the AFL-CIO?
During buyouts and mergers executives receive hundreds of millions of dollars for failing while hundreds of thousands of the working class lose their jobs and benefits such as health care insurance.
The next "civil war" within the borders of the United States will be between the have-too-muchers and the not-have-enoughers. Wait and see.
Regards,
John Jenkins
865-803-8179 cell
Hyperbole is the Best Thing Ever.
