executive pay

[Doug Henwood]

Jim heartfield wrote:

>First, esp. in the UK where this was raised, it is pointed that the
>discussion about exec pay is a self-criticism that is entirely generated
>from within business and amongst the establishment. There are no horny-
>handed sons of toil battering on the board room door demanding that the
>books be opened. Instead it is almost entirely a discussion arising out
>of business' own lack of confidence in itself.

I don't hear that here, but Americans rarely suffer from a lack of
confidence in themselves or their system. In fact, about 2/3 of Americans
tell pollsters that they live in the greatest country on earth, even though
most of them haven't been abroad. And about 3/4 of Americans believe in
heaven, and of those, 3/4 think they're going there, so the anxieties of
their Puritan cultural ancestors are history (a phrase Americans like to
use to consign something to insignificance).

>Second, the discussion around big exec pay rises does not create a good
>climate for pay claims amongst ordinary wage labourers. On teh contrary,
>a general climate is created in which any big pay demand is seen a
>greedy.

I sure don't see that. One set of people, workers, produce expanding
amounts of value and their pay is stagnant. Another set of people, senior
executives, extract value from their underlings, and their pay is growing
by leaps and bounds. The danger I see in pointing to this would be to
collapse class demands into mere "fairness" demands, but objecting to that
would be a luxury in this political climate, like objecting to reformism.

Doug