Searching for Solutions to Excessive Executive Pay

Are corporate executives with multimillion-dollar salaries stealing from their low- to mid-income workers (“Rise of the Corporate Plutocrats,” by Vince Beiser, Oct. 17)? Let’s do the math. If the salary of Citigroup’s Robert Willumstad was reduced from $30 million to a more reasonable $3 million per year, that would free up $27 million to pay 5,400 of the company’s lowest-paid workers an additional $5,000 per year. If Citigroup’s retired CEO Sanford Weill’s salary had been reduced from $98 million to $5 million, the $93 million saved could have paid 18,600 custodians, bank tellers and administrative assistants an additional $5,000 per year each.

Anyone who can’t live well on $3 million or $5 million per year shouldn’t be trusted with our money and shouldn’t be running a bank.

Crystal Cheryl Bell

Culver City

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What is interesting about this article is how America, as a society and culture, is deliberately lowering its standard of living to conform to a 100-year-old ideology called “free-market capitalism.” The fall of unions in America was not the result of National Guardsmen or Pinkerton agents. Rather, it was working people buying into the “anyone-can-make-it-rich” propaganda. Even worse, working people bought into the concept that wealth was purely a matter of individual drive and ability. If you are poor, that’s your fault.

Until America realizes that a 400-1 pay ratio between “management” and “labor” is not the innocent result of the free market, that outsourcing of labor is not inevitable or uncontrollable, or that labor itself--be it “brainwork” or physical--is not some inanimate commodity like coal or pork bellies, America will soon become the world’s largest Third World country, and the first country to become Third World through the will of its people.

Thomas Schelly

Hermosa Beach

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The existence of the new executive class completely discredits the persistent assertion today that running schools like a business will improve their performance. If that were true, then teachers would get dramatic salary increases regardless of the achievement of their students on state-mandated standardized tests--just as executives receive huge increases in compensation regardless of shareholder value.

It’s time to expose the double standard that permeates the debate over ways to improve schools. Open-market competition and freedom from regulation, which constitute the centerpiece of the business model, have not resulted in improved corporate performance. Yet the same ideological factors are being touted as the panacea to improved educational quality. It doesn’t take much to see through the facade camouflaging the agenda.

Walt Gardner

Los Angeles

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I couldn’t agree more that the much higher compensation for corporate executives does not seem to be matched by better corporate performance. What I don’t understand is Beiser’s contention that one reason this happens is because these people are “overwhelmingly wealthy, white, Protestant and male.”

Wealthy, I understand, as people used to a lot of money expect a lot of money. But the other three factors? And that the “8 million mostly white, affluent Americans” living in gated communities are somehow to blame. Beiser finds much better reasons for the meteoric rise of corporate pay, like stock options and third-party consulting firms pushing the salary figures higher and higher. Or maybe he’s telling me that my own compensation will shoot to the stratosphere if I move to a gated community.

Christopher B. Johnson

Pasadena