It's another Labor Day

Anyone who works full time - regardless of skill level - should be able to live above the poverty line. The fact that this is not true in America is a national disgrace. I want to share with you an article called "Beyond the Living Wage: A New Challenge for Progressives" that looks at the outrageous discrepancies between worker and CEO compensation. Here's part of what it says:

Over 120 communities, big and small alike, have now enacted ordinances that require businesses that win government contracts to pay a living wage. These victories have made an undeniable impact. Low-wage workers from Baltimore to Los Angeles have seen their annual take-home pay rise by hundreds, even thousands, of dollars.

Yet, as a sobering new report reminds us, the pay gap in America's workplaces - between workers and top executives - has actually widened, and significantly so. Last year, notes "Executive Excess 2006," a just-released report from the Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy, top executives at major U.S. corporations took home 411 times more than average workers.

In 1994, at the birth of the living wage movement, chief executive pay outpaced pay for average workers by only 142 times.

All this concentrating of wealth at the top of our corporate ladder has become America's single biggest engine of inequality. Between 1993 and 2003, according to researchers at Harvard and Cornell, the top five executives at America's 1,500 biggest companies more than doubled their share of corporate earnings. These top execs took home $290 billion, over a quarter of a trillion dollars.

The impact of executive pay jackpots on our great divide actually goes far beyond the sheer immensity of this $290 billion. To fatten corporate bottom lines and hit those jackpots, executives have downsized workers, outsourced jobs, gutted pensions, trimmed benefits, and slashed R & D. These executive decisions, taken together, have left American workers appreciably poorer and American companies considerably less competitive.

I was not aware of those numbers - that is, that CEO compensation went from being 142 times worker pay in 1994 to 411 times worker pay. To call that obscene is to put it mildly. There is no word that adequately expresses how outrageously wrong that is. I grieve for this country, for this society, that it has become a culture of unfettered and actually celebrated greed and selfishness. Let us do what we can to work for economic justice in our land and remember the reason for this holiday we observe today.