Fairness honed over hundreds of years in the employment society, tells us that people should be paid commensurate to their level of work. the $70K across the board idea was doomed to enrage the employee base as fundamentally unjust. OTOH, people doing the same level of work should be paid the same.

But, executive compensation has become outrageously unfair and needs to be restored to fair levels.

CEO or top comp in a medium size company of about 5000 employees should receive about 30 times remuneration of the shop floor level full time employee. If shop floor or clerical level are not receiving a living wage, government guaranteed income should supplement that to insure justice in the system. Over the last 40 years, execs have become greedy to the extreme and most now make over 500-1000 times basic FT worker. What a shame.

These managers are not risking their own capital. They are not capitalists, they are greedy back scratching overpaid and unnecessarily so, managers.

If they want to get rich, let them invest their own money in the company.

Disclosure: these are conclusions from decades of research.