As reported in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram this morning (28 May 2014):

“Average CEO pay at large companies tops $10 million… Last year was the fourth straight that CEO compensation rose.”

In just one of those four years, from 2012 to 2013, the rise in CEO median pay was unfathomably steep: from $9.6 to $10.5 million.

If people don’t believe in enacting a higher minimum wage due to its potential to hurt small businesses, that is understandable. But when corporations are so profitable that the CEO receives an 8.8% raise, then an 8.8% raise for everyone in the company seems not only fair but also smart for business. Wait…now the company can’t afford it? Well, let’s just chop .8% off of the CEO’s raise. That will likely cover everyone else’s, no?

This same disparity is at work in higher ed. When heads of colleges make from 400 k (community college) to 1m+ (university) and adjunct professors (60+ % of the professors in higher ed) make $35 an hour ONLY for the hours spent in the classroom and not for lesson planning or grading AND are restricted to only a few classes so the college will not have to pay benefits, this is beyond shameful.

This disrespect goes beyond the financial. As a friend of mine explains, “I know so many who are continuing to be squeezed for more performance while corporate profits increase like crazy at the companies they work for. Positions are being eliminated without being replaced, higher salaried workers who have been there for years are being fired for no reason just so that they can be replaced by new workers at lower wages, and the performance of the company is taking backseat to the corporate earnings report. Such short sighted practices are not going to help America regain our footing in the world economy. Such a frustrating situation.”

In short, the financial disparity goes hand in hand with a devaluing of the work and workers at the heart of any institution’s success story.

This disrespect is mirrored back to the world when we look at rageful employees who eventually resort to violence. Michael Kimmel, in an article on Salon.com (“Why is it always a white guy: The roots of modern, violent rage”), discusses the rage of disgruntled workers that sometimes boils over.

While not dismissing acts of violence perpetuated by these disgruntled employees, Kimmel does add to that conversation the notion that there is increasing empathy by the American “every-man” (and, indeed, both the violence and the empathy often belong to men specifically) for disgruntled workers who “go postal.” This “every-man” seems to need no prompting to note that perhaps that person just “snapped” and perhaps that person had been overworked, underpaid, devalued and belittled in innumerable ways, and, at last, unceremoniously “let go” (a euphemism worthy of an Orwellian nod).

Certainly such empathy is somewhat unnerving—yet it is also quite revealing.

Summing up this sense of disenfranchisement among everyday workers, Kimmel offers a resonant metaphor:

“Like Willy Loman, [who is] perhaps the quintessential true believer in the ideology of [the] self-made American,” these workers believe,” that if they [work] hard and [live] right, they, too, [can] share in the American Dream.”

A core tenet of American capitalism holds that taking away competitiveness removes the incentive to improve—yet companies act in opposition to this tenet when they clearly disincentivize workers by siphoning off money for heads of companies while others’ wages remain flat.

Also, concentrating rather than spreading the wealth will indisputably weaken the economy as a whole. Yet these practices persist and become more entrenched with each passing year.

Even if many in America have a distaste for increasing the minimum wage, a wider sharing of the spoils of victory within successful companies seems as though it would benefit not only the individual and the corporation—but also the economy and even the morale of the nation at large.