Hi,
on sunday Switzerland will vote on wether to prevent earnings of a company's top managers to be higher than 12 times the income of the lowest paid employee.
http://www.businessinsider.com/switzerland-to-vote-on-executive-pay-law-sunday-2013-11
What do you think about this 1:12 referendum? Is it fair to limit the sallary of the highest paid employees or is it ok that a manager's monthly salary is higher than the annual income of low paid workers?
Is this proposed law a constraint of freedom for the companies and can it harm competitiveness?
I am looking forward to your opinions!
to be honest, I am not quite sure if this law will pass the Swiss legislation. As stated in the article, accodring to surveys more people are opposing this law than supporting it. Therefore I highly doubt that it will be passed.
AntwortenLöschenI feel this referedum is more about creating something to calm the more and more tensioning opinions about the wealth situation within the country. In the article it says that the gap between gap and poor is getting bigger, and people are more and more dissatisfied with the situation.
I am not sure if a refrendum like this will change any situation, and if so, maybe not into the right direction. If the wages of the top-managers are cut, I highly believe that also their motivation and willigness to work extraordinarily will be cut as well... And in the end the "small" worker earns as much as before, so he/she will not have any direct beneifts from it.
I believe it could have harmed only certain individuals and now when
AntwortenLöschenmeasure was opposed by 65% of voters it certainly won't happen.
From my perspective there is a huge social social problem because high salaries are getting higher while low salaries are getting only lower or stagnate meaning that inequality gap is growing tremendously and consequence of that is slow recovery of the economies after financial crisis.
Reasons for Swiss voters to defeat the proposal to cap top executives' pay to 12 times the wages of their lowest-paid employees, as stated in the media,are inter alia that the Swiss want to make clear that setting salaries is not a matter for the government. I bearly doubt that.
AntwortenLöschenWhat sounds much more reasonable is that voters have been convinced that a pay ceiling would destroy Switzerland's international competitiveness and drive out many multinational companies. This is a perfect example for what Polina mentionaed above. In the future, Swiss salaries for top managers will further increase since multinational companies (Nestlé, P&G, UBS, etc.), already granting very high remunerations to their managers, will remain in the country and will even multiply, considering Switzerland as a "save haven" - both in terms of economic stability and financial matters aka high pay.
Doubtlessly, if executive pay further rose, the average earner's wage would not increase along with it - even though Switzerland claims to be a socially stable country without extreme class disparities like seen elsewhere. That might still be true but without imposing limits on top management pay this "socially stable" situation might change sooner or later.
Anyway, for me, this referendum was a rather ethical question. What I intend to say is: where is equality in having a manager earning in one month what an average employee earns in a whole year?
Hi Sabine!
AntwortenLöschenIn my opinion there definitey has to be a difference between a manager´s montly salary and a normal employee´s salary since the workload is much more for a manager than for the other one. However, there are working people, which do nearly as much work as for example CEOs, so therefore it is the company´s duty to decide on how much an employee deserves to earn.