When it comes to compensation, big business executives go above and beyond every year to give new meaning to the word indecency.
The current year is still relatively young and yet, already, the mixture of audacity and unconsciousness that they show regarding the salaries and other advantages offered leaves us speechless.
The most recent news on this subject dates from a few days ago.
Traumadvise: what you will read in the following lines is disturbing, as belt-tightening due to rising grocery prices has become a national sport.
We learned that the five most senior executives of Loblaw, last year, were entitled to 32 million dollars in salaries and bonuses. This is an annual increase of 52%.
Our reporter Martin Vallières reported that the company’s number two, Robert Sawyer, saw his base salary go from $666,667 to $1 million.1. And that’s only a small part of his overall compensation. In total, he pocketed no less than 9.35 million in 2022.
You read that right: 9.35 million for this former president and CEO of Rona.
And Galen Weston, the company’s number one? His pay jumped to $11.79 million “after consultants hired by the company his family controls determined he was underpaid,” the report said. Globe and Mail.
Here too, you read correctly.
” Underpaid. »
According to Annual report on food prices published late last year, a family of four will spend $1,065 more on their grocery cart this year than in 2022.
In connection with this phenomenon, in Quebec, food banks are reporting record traffic.
Nothing to add, your honor.
In 2004, after hurricane CharlieFlorida has been the scene of a debate on greed within the country which wants to be the symbol of capitalism.
Many businesses had decided to make a strict interpretation of the law of supply and demand. Victims without electricity in dire need of ice packs, hotel rooms or reconstruction aid have been bled dry. Prices for these goods and services have soared. A generator could be sold for almost ten times its usual price.
“You have to have a mind-boggling degree of greed in your heart to be willing to profit from the suffering of someone who has just been hit by a hurricane,” said then-State Attorney General Charlie Crist.
It is the philosopher Michael J. Sandel who recounts all this in a book entitled Justice.
He also recalls that some economists have defended excessive prices. In their eyes, these simply reflected the market price.
To which the philosopher replies that blindly defending the freedom of markets in such circumstances is to neglect an argument of a moral nature which is at the heart of the debate.
He explains that it is normal to be indignant in the face of such injustice.
“Greed is a vice, a condemnable way of being, especially when it has the effect of making one insensitive to the suffering of others,” writes Sandel. More than a personal vice, it is a vice that runs counter to civic virtue. In difficult times, a good society closes ranks. People help each other; they do not seek to seize the opportunity to maximize their profit. A society in which people make money on the backs of their neighbors in times of crisis is not a good society. Excessive greed is therefore a vice which a good society should, as far as possible, seek to discourage. »
The executives of the major food companies and all those who have endorsed the substantial increase in their remuneration would do well to reflect on the lesson of Michael Sandel.
To their credit, their industry is not alone in valuing excessive greed.
It’s generalized.
Last January, the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives revealed that the compensation of the 100 highest paid CEOs of companies listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange rose by 31% between 2020 and 2021.
These leaders earn 243 times the average salary in the country.
The trend is strong, and the gap continues to widen over the years.
Even some of the practices put in place to try to prevent executive compensation from soaring into the stratosphere often have a perverse effect. The advisory vote of shareholders on the remuneration policy, for example.
For an expert like François Dauphin, president and CEO of the Institute on Governance, things will only change “when we reach a level of awareness in society in general”.
Pressures for greater equity “between executive compensation and compensation in the company or in the company itself” will then have a real effect.
Until then, the exorbitant prices of a steak or a cauliflower will remain very difficult to swallow.