Returning to Business Is Going to Take a Pay Raise
Companies are going to have to open up their wallets to avoid a severe earnings recession.
The cost of reopening.
Photographer: Paul Yeung/Bloomberg
America’s top executives are warning of “economic catastrophe” if workers don’t return in May, according to Axios. Several of them told the media company that “they want to have a hard national conversation about trade-offs involved in any widespread lockdowns beyond the middle of next month.”
That conversation needs to include a general increase in wages, probably not a subject the CEOs want to talk about. America’s biggest companies and their CEOs have feasted on low-wage labor for years, even as evidence mounted that workers failed to make ends meet. It’s not that companies couldn’t afford to pay workers a living wage. Indeed, America’s biggest companies have enjoyed record profitability in recent years, and the CEO-to-worker pay ratio has swelled to more than 300 to 1, an obscene spread when many workers struggle to afford housing, health care, child care and other basic necessities.