Huge CEO Pay Hurts Workers

Regarding “CEOs Getting Handed a Bigger Slice of the Pie,” May 30:

Now I understand why companies say they no longer can afford to fund their employees’ healthcare and defined-benefit pensions. They’re giving it all to the chief executive and other top officers.

The sums are so huge that executive compensation might well be defined as corporate looting. Besides going to workers’ benefits, some of this money could have been directed to research and development or even increased dividends for shareholders.

One notices that Steve Jobs of Apple Computer Inc., a truly visionary and competent CEO, doesn’t ask for this kind of rip-off pay.

Peter Briscoe

Riverside

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The Times reports enormous CEO compensation and measures it as a percentage of corporate profit. How many of these companies increased their profit by cutting jobs and cutting pay, thus resulting in more profit to give to their CEOs?

In other words, which companies took money from average workers and gave it to the fabulously wealthy? Aside from that, should these people, or anyone, be getting $34 million or more for a year’s work?

Ira Spiro

Los Angeles

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The article and the pictures are revealing. We are making little, if any, progress in controlling the disparity between CEOs’ compensation packages and the average annual increases of the other workers in our organizations.

And the pictures of the top 10 CEOs reflect that not much progress is being made on the diversity front: all males and mostly white. It appears that the good old boys’ club continues to reign supreme.

My concern is that this story reflects problems in our society that are not being addressed aggressively. And my fear is that at some point, the people in the different disadvantaged constituencies will coalesce, leading to a far greater backlash than our society should have to manage. Better that we manage proactively than reactively.

Karl Strandberg

Long Beach

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My sympathy goes out to the CEOs whose enormous salaries and bonuses were published in The Times, because if my name were there, I would be so ashamed, I probably couldn’t sleep at night or face an ordinary citizen of this country.

Marolyn Dunlap

Manhattan Beach