Maybe America and other Countries should think about this. Something astounding is happening in Switzerland. For the first time ever, voters in a modern developed nation are going to be voting on whether to create what amounts to a “maximum wage.” The vote will come Sunday, November 24, on a ballot initiative that bans any Swiss corporate executive compensation that runs over 12 times worker pay. In effect, under this “1:12 Initiative for Fair Pay,” no Swiss company would be able to pay its top executives more in a month than the company’s lowest-paid workers make in a year. Swiss 1:12 activists Cédric Wermuth and Mattea Meyer. Photo Credit: Too Much Swiss corporations currently compensate their top execs more generously than any other nation in continental Europe. At pharmaceutical giant Roche, CEO pay runs 236 times the firm’s lowest wage. At Nestle, the divide spreads 188 times. Gross margins like these four years ago caught the attention of activists in Juso, the youth wing of Switzerland’s Social Democratic Party. The activists sensed growing public outrage at a corporate pay system that has, as former Juso president Cédric Wermuth recently related, “greedy managers earning millions while other people earn too little for living.” This past spring, the 1:12 effort filed enough signatures for ballot status — and Corporate Switzerland has been feverishly attacking the initiative ever since. They want to limit CEO pay to 12 times worker pay. Swiss society, 1:12 supporters counter, has functioned quite successfully in the not-so-distant past with quite narrow gaps between executive and worker compensation. In 1984, points out the Swiss Denknetz think tank, CEOs in Switzerland only averaged six times more in pay than average Swiss workers. A 1:12 campaign flyer that traces Switzerland’s growing divide between average worker and CEO compensation. Many Swiss today still remember those more equal times, one reason why headlines about 21st century executive paydays — like the $100.5 million Credit Suisse CEO Brady Dougan grabbed in 2010 — so infuriate the general public. In 2007, Swiss chief execs nationwide averaged 56 times more than average worker pay. But big companies pay their execs far more, the Swiss trade union federation points out and these execs desperately want their gravy trains to continue. Nestle, the drugmaker Novartis and other Swiss companies have been bombarding their employees with letters decrying the dangers 1:12 poses. Swiss corporate execs unleashed a similar political blitz earlier this year when corporate gadfly Thomas Minder, a successful entrepreneur, led a campaign to give shareholders more say over top executive pay — and ban executive new-hire and “golden parachute” bonuses. Corporate interests don’t have to reveal how many millions they’re pouring into the campaign to kill the 1:12 initiative and some observers are estimating that initiative opponents may be outspending supporters by as much as 50 times. Advocates for the 1:12 initiative see their effort as part of a broader “strategic counter-project” to reverse top 1 percent-friendly rule changes that have made Switzerland so much less equal over recent decades and next steps are filling the Swiss referendum pipeline. Among these next steps: an initiative to create a basic minimum income for everyone in Switzerland and campaigns to put in place both a stiff inheritance tax and a new tax on foreigners using Switzerland as a tax haven. The Swiss 1:12 activists see themselves as part of a global effort and 1:12-like campaigns, they note proudly, have taken root in France and Germany. The Swiss 1:12 activists are also staying in close contact with leading global egalitarian thinkers. They’ve hosted talks in Zurich, Basel and Bern, for instance, from the British epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson, one of the world’s foremost authorities on the impact of inequality on our daily lives. The 1:12 effort, Wilkinson noted last week, has already made a major contribution — by helping the entire world understand that businesses “do not have to be organized as systems for the undemocratic concentration of wealth and power.”
Posted on: Fri, 22 Nov 2013 18:15:40 +0000