D. Brabec is absolutely right-on in the letter published Tuesday, and makes a great point about executive salaries.
I realize that the initial reference to nurses” salaries appeared in an advertisement that was paid for by a corporation. The ad was written by the corporation and obviously no one else can exercise editorial control over a paid ad, regardless of the truth or merits of its content.
However, there were multiple articles about the September strike, which included newspaper interviews with corporate management. There would have been an opportunity to ask the corporation to explain how the dollar amount in the advertisement was arrived at ? for instance, is the average calculated across the state, including urban areas where nurses are paid much more than here in Lake County? ? and to ask for salaries of the corporation”s top management executives, including the CEO of the entire organization as well as salaries of top management personnel here in Lake County.
In any discussion of executive salaries, one needs to include the millions of dollars in bonuses and stock options paid to senior management, since in many cases, those amounts far exceed the actual “salary.” This reward system is inverted in America; unlike any other developed country in the world, the pay increases while the company”s overall performance decreases. In America, CEO failure is routinely rewarded.
In 1980, the average compensation of a CEO was about 20 times that of the average worker in his company. Today it is closer to 400 times.
I think your readers would welcome such full disclosure. If the corporation refuses to provide that information, I think readers would be interested to know that, too.
By including top management salaries in any article related to worker salary issues, the Record-Bee and other media could begin to shed some real truth about what has been going wrong with the American economy for decades.
Deb Baumann
Upper Lake
