NEW YORK, Dec. 11 (Xinhua) -- The public has seized on the shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in the middle of midtown Manhattan last week to air its long list of grievances against what it views as a broken healthcare system, and the issue goes deeper than just the healthcare industry, encompassing a broader business world that the public increasingly says it distrusts, reported Bloomberg News on Wednesday.
"Companies need to acknowledge that the root cause of this (anger) is not treating humans with dignity and respect," Alison Taylor, New York University business school professor and author of Higher Ground: How Business Can Do the Right Thing in a Turbulent World, was quoted as saying.
According to Bloomberg's data analysis, the top 1 percent Americans now hold a greater percentage of wealth than the entire middle 40 percent; 30 years ago, the reverse was true. To get to this point, the wealth of the very richest had to grow exponentially faster than that of the poorest. Meanwhile, U.S. corporate profits now make up a larger share of GDP, while worker compensation has lost ground.
In 1965, the CEO-to-worker pay ratio was 21-to-one, meaning it would take 21 years for a typical employee to match what their CEO made in a year. In 2022, the ratio was 344-to-one, according to the Economic Policy Institute, with a projected average compensation of CEOs at the 350 largest publicly owned U.S. companies at 25.2 million dollars.
"Outbursts of anti-corporate sentiment have happened before: the Occupy Wall Street movement, for one. And they're likely to keep happening more frequently and -- unfortunately, violently -- unless the business world does something to address the ways it has exacerbated the income gap and the feeling that fatter corporate profits come at the expense of everything and everyone else," noted the report. ■
