As I see it, if the production of a factory is expanding, and workers are satisfied, it's OK for there to be a disparity. The best paid should be about three times more than the worst paid.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Pay disparity has always been there.
In our high-tech, high-skilled economy where low-skilled work is being scaled back, phased out, exported, or severely under-compensated, all the right behavior in the world won't create better jobs with more pay.
Obscene salaries send the wrong message through a company. The message is that all brilliance emanates from the top; that the worker on the floor of the store or the factory is insignificant.
I want my people to work hard. But if they see me earning a lot more than they do, they would lose their sense of being owners of the factory, and what I say as factory manager wouldn't stick.
I had to work to put myself through school, so I always worked in the heaviest industries I could find because that's who paid the best.
When you read about the best places to work, it's never about salary; it's about catered lunches, the daycare - it's the cool stuff that matters.
It's not reasonable for companies that have chief executives and board members who are paid very considerable sums to subsidise low pay through in-work benefits.
Eye-popping tales of growing income inequality are hardly new. By now, nearly every American must be painfully aware of the widening pay gap between top executives and shop floor laborers; between 'Master of the Universe' financiers and pretty much everyone else.
As with the factory, so with the office: in an assembly line, the smaller the piece of work assigned to any single individual, the less skill it requires, and the less likely the possibility that doing it well will lead to doing something more interesting and better paid.
We've always been in favor of improved wages for workers. When you have a strong middle class, they want to buy more stuff at Costco.