Steven Clifford has been a CEO at King Broadcasting Company for five years and National Mobile Television for nine years; He has been a director of thirteen companies and has chaired the compensation committee for both public and private companies.
He has come around to the position that 1. CEOs of public companies in America are wildly overpaid; 1. We should blame the compensation consultants for this; 3. Potential ramifications go far beyond inequality and politics, it is potentially very damaging to the economy.
So says Clifford in his surprising book, “The CEO Pay Machine: How it Trashes America and How to Stop it.”
Clifford notes that the pay gap between chief executive officers of publicly traded U.S. firms when compared to their workers has changed dramatically — its grown 95 times faster than that of their average workers. In the 1970s, CEOs were paid 25X their employees; today, CEOs get paid 300 to 700 times more than the average worker.
From 2011 to 2014, there were 4 CEOs who earned $100 million per year; these companies could have paid them 90% less and still generated the same returns. Despite all of the usual outrage, very people critics understand the factors that have caused the upward spiral in executive compensation.
All of the book discussed can be found here.
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