How About Limiting CEO Pay To 100 Times The Minimum Wage?

Lately we've come to the conclusion that the whole concept of billionaires is illegitimate and an existential threat to democracy. But, short of a guillotine, how do you protect society by getting rid of them? Progressive taxation is the obvious choice, of course. And Switzerland is voting on an interesting way of guaranteeing better income equality today. Have you heard about the maximum wage ratio yet? It sure isn't something the billionaires who control the American corporate media want you to hear about.

The plan, widely labeled "radical," limits the monthly pay of top executives to 12 times that of their lowest paid employees' yearly salary. Here in the U.S., the average CEO earns 200 times the salary of their lowest paid employee.

Limiting compensation to 1:12 would be a historic change: Currently, a lot of Swiss firms have a ratio of more than 100:1. Roche, the Swiss drug giant, reportedly paid its top executive $13.9 million in 2012, and its lowest $59,000-- a ratio of 1:236.

…The idea was proposed through Switzerland's direct democracy system, and if more than 50% of voters and representatives of the Swiss federal states (cantons) agree to it, it must become law. Voters have had a month to vote via post, and on Sunday they can attend polling stations.

It's fascinating to wonder what a country with a 1:12 salary cap would look like. David Roth, the leader of the youth wing of Swiss party the Social Democrats, and one of the architects of the plan, recently told Business Insider that he expected that salaries would go down, and then the money would be spent on lower paid workers and investing in the companies. On the other hand, however, Swiss executives had warned that their companies would leave the country if the bill passed (Roth said that such an attitude was "quite arrogant").

Of course, such a plan is a long shot-- Business Insider recently spoke to a number of experts on Swiss politics, and none of them thought the bill would pass. One recent poll says that the yes votes stand at 36%, which would mean a clear defeat.

We should know in a few hours. This week John Sutter reported about it for CNN, urging that the U.S. start taking the proposal seriously. He says "the idea of tethering top executive pay to SOME sort of concrete metric might stop American execs from floating further into the stratosphere."

Here in America, the land of unequal opportunity, the CEOs of top-500 companies make in a single day about what it takes an average "rank-and-file" worker a year to earn, according to the AFL-CIO, the federation of unions. Switzerland has an average CEO-to-worker compensation ratio of 148 to 1, the group says.

The average U.S. rate is 354 to 1, according to the AFL-CIO.

Others put the ratio somewhat lower, around 273 to 1 in 2012.

Either way, it's bad. And some U.S. companies are worse, still. JC Penney Co. has the highest ratio-- 1,795:1-- on a list of 250 businesses compiled by Bloomberg. That department store's CEO got $53.3 million in pay and benefits in 2012, Bloomberg says. Workers, by comparison, earned only about $30,000 a year.

So, like, whatever, right? What's Miley up to? It's tempting to excuse sky-high exec pay as either necessary (to attract top "talent" and because these inequality-era celebs are thought to increase the value of the companies where they exercise said talents) or inconsequential. The Swiss vote, for example, does nothing to increase average worker pay. It aims solely to clip cash from the very top of the economic ladder.

But the pay ratio does matter, for a couple of common-sense reasons.

One is that democracy starts to unravel if a few people become wildly, ethereally successful, while the rest of a country struggles. That was the best argument I heard on a recent phone call with Cedric Wermuth, a Swiss politician who has been one of the earliest proponents of the 1:12 initiative. Wermuth is not arguing for the enforced pay ratio on practical or economic grounds. His is a moral position-- that it is fundamentally unfair for the pay gap to be so wide, and that it allows a few uber-rich people to wield undo influence over society, economics and politics.

"There is a certain threat to democracy," he told me.

Wermuth doesn't expect the 1:12 initiative to pass, but it does have about 35% to 40% support in recent polls, he told me, which is fairly staggering, and indicates people are fed up.

Another argument against sky-high CEO pay is that it's unnecessary. Lynn Stout, a distinguished professor of corporate and business law at Cornell Law School, told me CEO pay has been rising for decades and that the Untied States is, in effect, subsidizing the trend with "unlimited tax deductions" on certain forms of pay.

"I'm a big fan of capitalism," she said. "I love corporations and I love the business world and I think it's done more for peace and prosperity than people may realize. But there are structural reasons to think that executive pay and CEO pay are out of whack."

A $1 million salary worked for American CEOs from the 1930s to 1980s, she said. CEO pay, including options realized that year, jumped about 875%, to $14.1 million, from 1978 to 2012, according to the Economic Policy Institute. That increase, which is calcuated using 2012 dollars, according to EPI, is "more than double stock market growth and substantially greater than the painfully slow 5.4% growth in a typical worker's compensation over the same period."

A 5% increase at the bottom versus 875% at the top.

That's the same, right?

"What we've got is basically an arms race," Stout said, "where the CEOs are competing on pay because they each want to have higher status than the others."

Finally, all of this is bad business. Peter Drucker, who is recognized as the father of business management, famously said the CEO-to-worker salary ratio should not exceed 20:1, which is what existed in the United States in 1965, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Beyond that, managers will see an increase in "resentment and falling morale," Drucker once wrote, according to a blog post by The Drucker Institute.

That resentment is behind both the Occupy movement and the Swiss vote.

So the question to me is not if we should do something about outlandish executive pay, but what, exactly. The 1:12 ratio would be unlikely to gain any traction in the Untied States, said Mark Borges, principal at Compensia, a company that does consulting on executive pay issues. He called the measure, which, according to Wermuth, includes stock options and other non-salary forms of pay, "potentially draconian" and said most ratios between CEO and worker pay he hears discussed deal with three-digit numbers. Twelve is a shock, I'll agree, and it's probably too extreme for the United States.

…The best idea I've heard comes from Stout, the Cornell professor. She has suggested making CEO pay non-deductible when it's higher than 100 times the minimum wage.

I might take it one step further: Perhaps the United States should cap CEO pay at 100 times the minimum wage, combining Stout's idea with the Swiss proposal.

It's just an idea, and it should be vetted by economists and the public. But, to me, that's the point. These are concepts that should be on the table in the United States. It's ridiculous that SEC attempts to make CEO pay ratios transparent are controversial in the business community. The conversation needs to move forward.

Limiting CEO pay to 100 times the minimum wage would still allow top execs to be millionaires-- they'd earn a maximum wage of about $1.5 million per year, given the current federal minimum of $7.25 an hour, figured for a 40-hour work week. And here's the best part: If the fat cats wanted a pay increase, maybe the best way for them to get it would be to throw political weight behind a campaign to boost the minimum wage.

That's a reform simple enough to make a difference.

Keep in mind that the world's 2,170 billionaires control $33 trillion in net worth, double the U.S. GDP. Is that dangerous? You bet your life it is! Is it possible that instead of representing the interests of the general population, what the central banks simply do is follow the instructions of a far smaller cabal, that of the world's uber wealthy?

In case there is any confusion, the above is a rhetorical question. It goes without saying that what the world's largest wealth accumulators want above all else, is to preserve a status quo that allows their capital-based wealth to increase as fast and as much as possible in a regime of reflating asset prices, while keeping the bulk of the world's population distracted, entertained, and collecting their daily welfare check.

UPDATE: Swiss Weenie Out Of Reining In The Plutocrats

As expected, the vote failed. Just around a third of the voters approved, What's worse, "initiatives need a majority of both voters and cantons (states) to pass in a referendum; by Sunday afternoon, results from 20 of the 26 cantons were in and all had voted against."

Sunday's referendum came after voters in a March vote voiced anger at perceived corporate greed by deciding to boost shareholders' say on executive pay and ban one-off bonuses known as "golden hellos" and "goodbyes."

However, the new "1:12 initiative" from Switzerland's Young Socialists calling for a fixed legal cap on pay appeared to be a step too far for centrist and conservative voters.