The defenders of executive compensation argue that senior executives make the most significant contribution to a company’s success; ergo, outsize compensation is justified. But the NBER Shared Capitalism Research Project has shown the opposite: Distributing rewards across the corporation—sharing them with workers—is the most efficient way of making businesses more successful. Motivated employees are more productive and spur innovation in products and processes…
Freeman, Blasi, and Kruse propose a simple way to encourage companies to follow the Googles and Wegmans of the world: Allow them to deduct incentive pay as a cost of business only if they offer the same incentive program to all workers. In other words, don’t give tax breaks to companies that provide stock options and bonuses to only a few executives. This would correct a major loophole in the tax system with which corporate executives have been enriching themselves at the expense of their stockholders and taxpayers. (The U.S. Tax Code does not allow the deduction of salaries beyond $1 million as a business expense, but it does allow companies to deduct as a cost of business any amounts paid as incentive compensation.)
This proposal is not as radical as it may seem. It is, rather, American capitalism at its best, the extension of a system that has engendered the success of such major companies as Google (GOOG), Apple (AAPL), and Procter & Gamble. The same principles already apply to pension and health-care plans—these are deductible as a cost of business only when they cover every employee. Compensation should be subject to the same rules, which will encourage more companies to extend incentive pay to all workers. And most importantly this change would make U.S. businesses more productive while benefiting workers.
via How to Fix Oversize Executive Compensation – BusinessWeek, 3/25/2011.
According to Corey Rosen, National Center for Employee Ownership:
The ideas here make sense. We have become infatuated with the idea that companies rise and fall based on a few key people. Yet study after study (and the rhetoric of CEOs insistent that “people are our most important asset”) show that the level of employee engagement at work is the single most important determinant of corporate performance. Engaged employees come up with the ideas, large and small, that move companies forward. Companies that share ownership widely grow 2-3% per year faster than would have been expected to otherwise, for instance, their employees have three times the retirement assets, and they are much less likely to go bankrupt.
As I recall, much of the research into employee ownership and worker participation showed tremendous gains when these factors were linked. There was a raft of experiments in the 1970s and 1980s. I, myself, was somewhat involved with Rath Meatpacking when it became the largest worker-owned firm in the United States. In many of these situations productivity shot up but management shut them down because employee participation took power away from them… especially middle management. I like the ideas advocated by Freeman, Blasi, and Kruse. Unfortunately, the Business Roundtable and the US Chamber of Commerce are likely to express strong opposition.
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