‘Ugly’ pay disparity

In the June 22 Business Monday section, the centerpiece article, Executive pay, highlighted the differences between the growth of CEO pay and the growth of company profits.

While illustrating that CEOs’ salaries often grew much more than their company’s profits is important and enlightening (though not surprising), I would have appreciated accompanying charts illustrating the growth of the average workers’ pay in those same companies. I’d be willing to bet everything that the disparity is even greater than the pay-raise-to-profit ratio.

Unfortunately, shareholders often care too much about profit and rising stock prices and not enough about CEO compensation. They pay no attention at all to whether a company fairly compensates its employees. Perhaps people need to be shown just how ugly the disparity is.

This story was originally published June 27, 2015 at 1:00 PM with the headline "‘Ugly’ pay disparity."