Letter to the Globe and Mail: CEO Compensation

[I've written several letters to the editor the past month. None has been published; I'll post three of them here.]

Re “RBC paid CEO $26 million last year” (March 7): In the fourth century BCE Plato suggested than in human societies governments should “permit a man to acquire double or triple, or as much as 4 times the amount [that is deemed to be at poverty levels].” Twenty-first century surveys suggest that most people today are in rough agreement; both liberals and conservatives feel CEOs should be paid 4-5 times what ordinary workers are paid.

Current starting pay for a bank teller at RBC is under $20 per hour (a little under $40,000 a year). I’ve just pulled out my calculator; RBC’s CEO was paid about 700 times more than that bank teller.

I’m with Plato.

[Here's a link to my long piece on this topic from some years ago, "Why Plato Was Right: Those at the Top Should Be Paid No More than Three or Four Times What We Pay Those at the Bottom": https://donlepan.blogspot.com/2017/06/bringing-end-to-luck-money-why-those-at.html]

CEO Compensation

(The following is the full version of a letter to The Globe and Mail that was published in slightly edited form on June 1. I have been developing a longer argument on this topic; I will post that shortly.)

I may be unusual among CEOs in entirely agreeing with Mark Roberts (letters, May 30) that CEO compensation should be limited to a certain multiple of the compensation of a corporation’s lowest-paid employee. I remember that many years ago a Manitoba premier suggested this idea—and suggested that three would be an appropriate multiple. That sounds about right to me—and it’s a multiple that I don’t think our corporation has ever exceeded in its 32 years. It’s just about impossible to work more than three times as hard as someone else; there are only 24 hours in a day. Should one be paid more for having more ability or education? Perhaps, but arguably it’s at least as fair in the other direction to compensate someone for having been disadvantaged in the talent they were born with, or the upbringing they had, or the educational opportunities they never had.