jackfinarelli said:
Consider the hourly wage for someone like A-Rod or Kobe Bryant or [fill in the blank for a sports superstar here] and compare it to the hourly wage for someone in the PR department for the team that employs the superstar.
Is that justifiable?
If it is, then this disparity is justifiable with similar reasoning. If not...
But you also have to consider the performance of an A-Rod against the performance of a PR person.
True, you probably would be able to find plenty of other PR people who could fill the role, but by paying A-Rod $28 million (or whatever he makes these days), that says that he cannot be replaced very easily. But as the Yankees are proving this year, they've done quite well without him. He's not living up to his value for this year.
Now, like all major leaguers, he has that guaranteed contract, but in the real world, there aren't very many employees who have guaranteed multi-year contracts. If he was like the rest of us on a year-to-year (or really, day-to-day) basis, odds are he would have only made a fraction of that $28 million this year because of last year's performance and the injury. And judging by how the Yankees are doing this year, he probably wouldn't be making as much next year.
Judge A-Rod like a CEO whose performance is poor, and there'd be a lot of carping about him too. Come to think of it, there's been plenty of that. Because his performance, as well as his past attitude, is not living up to his pay package.
Charlie Finley once suggested that if the MLB owners would really be on the ball with free agency, they'd only allow one-year contracts because there would be mass quantities of players competing with each other each free-agency winter for a finite amount of money, which would have made the most valuable players rich, and the less valuable poor. That of course, was dismissed, both for the sheer chaos it would have caused, and because nobody would want to bunt because it could cost them money. If A-Rod was on a year-by-year contract, odds are, he'd be making much less now. Because there wouldn't be too many teams falling over themselves to sign an .050 postseason hitter with a bad hip.
In the Walmart scenario, using the 1983 numbers of 42 times the average worker, the CEO should be making about $1.1 million. Which means that people are looking at what he does to justify earning the extra $19+ million. He may be the best CEO of all time and deserve it. But if his performance is poor, would Walmart be able to get along without him? Probably.
When we look at high salaries, we look to see if they justify their pay. If someone is the among the highest-paid in their industry, I expect that they're among the best in the industry. If they're not, then nobody should be surprised if people get upset about what they're doing to earn their pay. If A-Rod comes back and hits .220 this year, people will boo him. If profits fall and the stock price tumbles, people will complain about the CEO.
