CEO pay greed soars out of control while workers earn less

Don't laugh. That's what American Express CEO Henry Golub got in 1997.

The average CEO pay went up 35 percent in 1997 to $7.8 million, according to Business Week's new executive pay survey. That comes to $150,000 a week.

Average worker pay went up 3 percent last year - all the way to $424 a week. Workers still earn less in wages, adjusting for inflation, than they did in the 1970s.

The average CEO made 326 times the pay of factory workers last year, up from 209 times factory workers' pay in 1996. Back in 1980, when many more workers were unionized, the wage gap was much smaller: CEOs made 42 times as much as factory workers.

Additionally, the richest families in America (those making $560,000 and more) have had their taxes reduced by almost $16,000 since 1977 while the average working family is paying $287 more in taxes that same period.

CEO greed inflation is out of control

The 1997 pay survey doesn't "even reflect the largest single option sale ever," say Business Week. In December, 1997, Disney CEO Michael Eisner exercised 7.3 million stock options worth more than $400 million. But, since the sale came after the close of Disney's fiscal year, Eisner's windfall won't show up until next year's pay survey. Eisner has more stock option fortunes to come.

That's not the case for the families who save for years to visit Disney World, or the workers paid pennies an hour to make Disney toys in China and Vietnam.

Corporations are increasingly paying multimillion-dollar "retention bonuses" to CEOs who have no intention of leaving. "From huge signing or retention bonuses to perks such as tax planning and jet use in perpetuity, to exit packages that guarantee big bucks even if an exec. is chased out of office, financial risk is virtually eliminated,," say Business Week.

The former head of Apple Computer, Gilbert Amelio, is a great example. As The Wall Street Journal noted in its executive pay report, Apple lost nearly $2 billion during Amelio's brief tenure of 17 months. About 3,600 employees lost their jobs. Amelio's golden parachute included $6.7 million in severance pay plus other compensation. Amelio wasn't satisfied. He said the Apple package "didn't protect my downside as well as I had hoped it would."

Wall Street executive Julian Robertson says it well: "Everybody here is overpaid, knows they are overpaid and is determined to continue to be overpaid."

Right now, taxpayers help pay for outrageous CEO salaries because corporations can deduct them as a business expense. The Income Equity Act, introduced by Representative Martin Sabo, D-Minn., would cap the deductibility of executive compensation at 25 times that of the lowest paid full-time company worker. The act now has more than 45 co-sponsors.