CEOs vs. Slaves (The Nation)

[marmar]

article | posted May 29, 2007 (web only)
CEOs vs. Slaves
Barbara Ehrenreich


This article originally appeared on Barbara Ehrenreich's blog.

Recent findings shed new light on the increasingly unequal terrain of American society. Starting at the top executive level: You may have thought, as I did, that the guys in the C-suites operated as a team--or, depending on your point of view, a pack or gang--each getting his fair share of the take. But no, the rising tide in executive pay does not lift all yachts equally. The latest pay gap to worry about is the one between the CEO and his--or very rarely her--third in command.

According to a just-reported study by Carola Frydman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Raven E. Saks at the Federal Reserve, thirty to forty years ago, the CEOs of major companies earned 80 percent more, on average, than the third-highest-paid executives. By the early part of the twenty-first century, however, the gap between the CEO and the third in command had ballooned up to 260 percent.

Now take a look at what's happening at the very bottom of the economic spectrum, where you might have pictured low-wage workers trudging between food banks or mendicants dwelling in cardboard boxes. It turns out, though, that the bottom is a lot lower than that. On May 16, a millionaire couple in a woodsy Long Island suburb was charged with keeping two Indonesian domestics as slaves for five years, during which the women were paid $100 a month, fed very little, forced to sleep on mats on the floor and subjected to beatings, cigarette burns and other torments.

This is hardly an isolated case (see my book Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy, co-edited with Arlie Hochschild). If the new "top" involves pay in the tens or hundreds of millions, a private jet and a few acres of Nantucket, the new bottom is slavery. Some of America's slaves are captive domestics, like the Indonesian women in Long Island. Others are factory workers, and at least 10,000 are sex slaves lured from their home country to American brothels by promises of respectable jobs.

CEOs and slaves: These are the extreme ends of American class polarization. But a parallel kind of splitting is going in many of the professions. Top-ranked college professors, for example, enjoy salaries of several hundred thousand a year, often augmented by consulting fees and earnings from their patents or biotech companies. At the other end of the professoriate, you have adjunct teachers toiling away for about $5,000 a semester or less, with no benefits or chance of tenure. There was a story a few years ago about an adjunct who commuted to his classes from a homeless shelter in Manhattan, and adjuncts who moonlight as waitresses or cleaning ladies are legion. .....(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070611/ehrenreich

[bluestateguy]

1. Maybe this problem wouldn't be as bad if Ehrenreich hadn't voted for Nader in 2000...in FLORIDA

Nader got many votes in 2000 from rich white liberals like Ehrenreich and college students from affluent families, exactly the people who suffered the least in the Bush Administration. There is a reason why Nader did poorly among non-whites and poor people--they understood the stakes of having to live under a Bush Administration.

[fasttense]

2. Nope, I don't believe that the votes for Nader are what won the 2000

presidential election. It was the dancing supremes who said DON'T COUNT THE VOTES and selected our pResident for we the people of the United States. I guess you could say they reduced the number of voting American citizens to nine black robed traitors.

[depakid]

3. LOL- I could have predicted the inevitable Nader smear

In case you didn't realize- the Gini coefficient (along with other measures of wealth inequality) inexorably rose under the Clinton administration's Republican lite policies... which was one of MANY reasons why Nader had a constituency in the first place!

[Joe Chi Minh]

4. A tiny elite and a population of slaves is the only logical outcome

of corporatism, unless it is eventually checked, because its doctrinaire promotors, basing themselves on wholly spurious and deranged beliefs concerning capitalism, would never voluntarily countenance restraint at any juncture, however suicidal the consequences. Not even the impending destruction of the planet, itself, could abate their brutish monomania for an endless increase of their own power and wealth.

In their utter insanity, capitalism's leaders on the far right (to which most bear pathological allegiance) are the humanoid equivalent of rabid dogs. Nor would the smaller share-holders be spared, but rather they would eventually have their shareholdings confiscated.

[marmar]

6. D'accord.

Sad but true.

[HooptieWagon]

7. true, that is the end result

but who will buy the products and services if the vast majority are poor? the corporations are committing suicide, but their greed makes them blind to it.

[wildhorses]

5. i believe this makes it official --

we ARE a third world nation, no doubt about it. long island:thumbsdown: