This went quietly unnoticed by media: House Repubs and Dems vote repeal Dodd Frank

[werepossum]

I hate this BS. Why bother asking me what my pay was at my previous job? That job and this job are not the same job. Do these freaks act like that in their personal lives? They meet a woman at the bar and ask how often her previous boyfriend nailed her?

It is strange behavior, akin to an admission that whoever hired you before is better at estimating your worth than am I, even though I'm the one with the specific job to be filled. It continues because employers know if you worked cheap before they too can probably pick you up more cheaply. Employers always want to hire you at the cheapest rate possible, although smart ones know to pay good employees enough to keep their eyes from straying. I do like your analogy though.

 

[Fern]

The specific provision 31 Republicans and five Democrats voted to repeal — section 953(b) of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act — imposes a new disclosure mandate on America’s major corporations. Under Dodd-Frank, corporations must annually reveal the ratio between what they pay their CEO and what they pay their median — most typical — workers.

Seems like rather useless data, particularly for investors etc.

Fern

 

[Dari]

Certainly the negative consequences are mostly a function of culture, because that determines what one views as good or bad. I think the only culture-independent bad metric would be reduced money to spend for other purposes, but CXO pay is seldom a very significant total outlay.

One soft negative I see is chasing top talent as evidenced by prior pay. CEO committees especially seem to me to believe that if someone else paid an applicant $50 million, then he must be 50 times as good as the candidate who was paid $1 million. Committees seem to spend a lot of attention on prior pay and size of companies helmed than to other things that are much more difficult to quantify, but ultimately much more important. A $1 million CEO who understands my industry and grew a $300,000 company into a $300,000,000 company will probably be much better for my $1 billion company than would a $100 million CEO who is totally unfamiliar with my industry and grew a $3,000,000,000 company into a $2,500,000,000 company.

But at any rate, my points were that this is none of my business and that Congress would be better served in addressing things that are my business - because I'm expected to pay for them.


QFT

You're missing the point. Outrageous pay tells everyone to put themselves ahead of the organization. Hence, when a position is open, people will do whatever it takes to get that position. In the end the organization loses because the focus is not on the organization but on each other. Worse, you don't get the best person for the job but sometimes the most destructive individual. Congress should pay attention to this because Congress' directive is narrow (mainly financials). The actions of these firms can have a significant impact on our economy. The better leaders at these firms the better we'll all be...

EDIT: When my advisor went to Washington they were mainly talking about financial companies. If D-F expanded it to all companies then it may be an overreach. But I can understand why they would do that. If the law was specific to financials then Wall Street would cry bias and it could be easily defeated in court...

 

[werepossum]

You're missing the point. Outrageous pay tells everyone to put themselves ahead of the organization. Hence, when a position is open, people will do whatever it takes to get that position. In the end the organization loses because the focus is not on the organization but on each other. Worse, you don't get the best person for the job but sometimes the most destructive individual. Congress should pay attention to this because Congress' directive is narrow (mainly financials). The actions of these firms can have a significant impact on our economy. The better leaders at these firms the better we'll all be...

EDIT: When my advisor went to Washington they were mainly talking about financial companies. If D-F expanded it to all companies then it may be an overreach. But I can understand why they would do that. If the law was specific to financials then Wall Street would cry bias and it could be easily defeated in court...

Everyone already puts herself in front of the organization; that's as it should be. It's the whole beauty of capitalism, that all of us making the best decisions for ourselves make in aggregate better decisions for society than would any benevolent dictator.

 

[Dari]

Everyone already puts herself in front of the organization; that's as it should be. It's the whole beauty of capitalism, that all of us making the best decisions for ourselves make in aggregate better decisions for society than would any benevolent dictator.

Nope. Other societies don't work that way and their way of doing things is arguably superior. Socialist systems in east Asia and northern Europe are better than the Anglo-Saxon model, imho. And they have the economies and societies to prove it.

 

[cubby1223]

Corporations have had to disclose what they pay their CEOs ever since the Great Depression. But they’ve never had to disclose, until Dodd-Frank became law in 2010, their CEO pay as a multiple of what their average workers are earning.

We should adjust this to report the CEO pay divided by how many employees are employed underneath him - or in other words, how much of a pay increase each worker receives if the CEO were paid nothing.