Most boards are made up of other CEOs, all of whom are a golfing buddies and sit on one another’s boards.  It’s an insider game in which they wink and take care of each other’s  puffed-up-pay-checks.  “It’s sort of like the Golden Rule gone wrong.” Observes a Harvard professor of business.

      What we have here are people who must be snorting undiluted hubris two or three times a day, giving them a constant high that makes them feel entitled to any excess.  CEOs treat all other employees as disposable units, but they see themselves as The Source, the irreplaceable fount of genius from which corporate success cannot be rewarded enough.

So even after the greed-induced col­lapse of the Enrons and WorldComs, even after the embarrassment of Tyco spending $6,000 to buy a shower curtain for its CEO ($6,000! Could you ever let it get wet?), and even after they've destroyed trust and sowed suspicion throughout the workplace, destroying the ethos of egalitarianism that is essential to a democratic soci­ety—these executives still don't get it, and are continuing to sepa­rate their personal enrichment from the common good.

Clearly these guys are out of control, and it's time for an inter­vention to save them (and us shareholders, workers et al.) from a total CEO pig-out.

What to do? Aha . . . I've got it! Since our corporate chieftains are endlessly extolling the virtues of global free-market policies to workers, Third World nations, environmentalists, and everyone else, what say we give them a little pinch of globalism?

CEOs say they shouldn't be bound by borders and have to pay U.S. wages or U.S. taxes. So here's the question: Why should we be bound by U.S. CEOs? Just as they've been able to roam the globe in search of the cheapest labor possible (currently in Vietnam at a nickel an hour, unless you count China's prison labor, which is "free"), so should we go a-roamin' for cheaper execs.

The average top executive in our country grabs five hundred times more in pay than the typical hourly employee in the same company. Compare this 500-to-l ratio with those in countries competing with us in the global market, as reported by BusinessWeek:

Brazil                    57 to 1

Mexico                  45 to 1

Hong Kong            38 to 1

Britain                  25 to 1

Australia               22 to I

China                   21 to l

Italy                    19 to 1

Spain                   18 to l

France                 16 to l

Taiwan                16 to l

Germany              11 to l

South Korea         11 to 1

Japan                         10 to l

So come on, you executive search committees, start thinking outside the box and apply a little global competition to the execu­tive suite! Today's princely CEOs say that their bloated paychecks are simply a product of what the market will bear. It's time to broaden the market.

Just as U.S. companies are routinely bringing in software pro­grammers from India and agricultural workers from Central Amer­ica to lower the pay scales in these industries, so can they import some skilled executives from Brazil, Italy, or Japan who'll work for a tenth or less of what our spoiled CEO workforce is getting.

We could create a special executive immigration program called something snappy, like ExecExpress, and instead of green cards issue them platinum cards. We'll get those astronomical pay packages down to earth in no time, the old-fashioned way: market magic.

Converting Safeway to Greedway

Corporate greed is not some amorphous concept, but a human char­acteristic that comes with faces and names—such as Steven Burd.

He's CEO of Safeway, the sprawling supermarket giant. Burd re­cently led the five-month charge in California to bust the wage scale and eliminate the health-care benefits of his industry's employees.

Supermarket work won't make you a millionaire, but thanks to the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW), employees who are unionized can earn a slice of American’s middle-class life (if their wife works also).  In California, baggers and clerks start at about $7.50 an hour and rise to about $18.  Its this rise to middle class that Burd and his corporate buddies targeted for eventual elimination., claiming that it’s no longer financially feasible for corporations to sustain such pay, health care, and other middle-class standards. 

Even though this industry’s profits were up 91 percent since 1998, including $10 billion in profits in 2002, excuitives have been wacking at workers’ earnings for some time.  For example, $18 an hour produces an income of about $36,000 per year for full-time work.  But grocery executive have been holding workers to between twenty-four and thrity-two hours a week—cutting annual earning to around $25,00—or less. 

Even this iwas too much for Burd, however.  As Safeway’s contract with UFCW was coming up for renewal in 2003, he demanded that their pay be frozen for two years, that their health-care benefits be slashed, and that new employees be hired at a drastically lowered pay scale.  This was Wall-Martization, and UFCW members balked.  Safeway refused to negotiate, however, forcing longtime workers to go on strike last October.  {This is the ugly nature of Capitalism with its juggernaut for higher profits—jk}