Compas Poll / Survey

The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives announced recently that the 100 highest paid public company CEOs earned as much in their first day and a quarter as the average wage-earner, about $ 39,000. The CEOs’ annual pay is about 8.5 million dollars.

That was the setting for a survey among CEOs and business leaders on the COMPAS panel. Panelists do believe that public company CEOs are overpaid but they tend to see this as a corporate more than societal problem. To the extent that a cure is possible, it lies in greater legal rights for shareholders, they say.

There exists some sympathy on the panel for the view that income differences as great as those portrayed by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives are wrong. Alongside this perspective is some belief that some high income earners deserve their benefits and some concern that “the cure [for income inequality] is often worse than the disease.”