Word: waging
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Critics of lavish executive compensation can be forgiven for sounding weary; their fight goes back to ancient Greece. Plato recommended that a community's highest wage should not exceed five times its lowest. By the late 1890s, the banker J.P. Morgan had increased it to 20 times the average. The Securities and Exchange Commission enacted strict executive-compensation-disclosure laws in 1938, but four years after that, the New York Times denounced President Franklin Roosevelt's attempt to cap Americans' pay at $25,000 (about $331,000 today) as a ploy to "level down from the top"; Congress rebuffed...
...potential for huge riches with little downside, encouraging risk-taking. In 1991, CEOs earned 140 times the average worker's pay. A 1993 attempt to cap compensation merely shifted more pay into options. By 2007 the median S&P 500 CEO earned in three hours what a minimum-wage worker pulled down in a year. And Great Recession or no, 2009 looks like more of the same...
...neighbor Guinevere Kirk, a nurse, is also firmly opposed to NAMA. Along with the rest of Ireland's public-sector workforce, she faces a probable wage cut in December when public spending is expected to be slashed in the budget in a bid to reduce Ireland's gaping deficit. "No one even knows if [NAMA] will work because it's never been done before," she says. "All I know is that it won't be the developers or bankers who'll be feeling the pain if it all goes wrong." (Read "Ireland's Economy: Celtic Crunch Time...
Cutting in Colorado: The Centennial State says it will reduce its hourly minimum wage by 4¢ next year, to $7.24, becoming the first to lower its rate since the U.S. passed a minimum-wage law in 1938. Officials say a 2006 amendment to Colorado's constitution--in which voters opted to tie minimum wage to inflation--forces them to cut the rate because the state's consumer price index fell this summer...
...California scores poorly in most "business friendly" ratings, which tend to focus on tax rates and wage levels rather than on, say, worker productivity or creativity. And the state has more than its share of no-no-no types protesting nanotechnology, synthetic biology and even some SunPower solar-energy projects, which could possibly imperil kangaroo rats and fairy shrimp. But the state's business culture fetishizes long-shot ventures and game-changing ideas. Failure is appreciated, not stigmatized, and an entrepreneur without a few busted start-ups on his résumé is almost suspect. (See TIME's City...