What’s in your wallet? $250 million?  That’s how much total loot Capital One gave its CEO, Richard D. Fairbank, in 2005 as a payment for his services[i].  Compare that outrageous compensation to the federal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that the gulf between The Worker and The Man grows larger every day.

The issue of CEO compensation, added to the fact that it is often seemingly unrelated to CEO performance, is one that in recent years has been receiving a great deal of media and public attention.  Companies have been paying their executives astounding compensation packages that often include special options that allow companies to report less payment in efforts to cloud the truth.  So while residents of the oil-producing Niger River Delta have seen a rise in pollution and acid rain as a result of oil spills and natural gas flaring in the past year, Forbes reports that in the past year, CEO Rex W. Tillerson of ExxonMobil has seen $4.12 million in base pay[ii]. Not to mention the 53-year-old chief executive would be an anomaly in Nigeria, where the life expectancy of a male is only 46.52 years[iii].  Coincidentally Mr. Tillerson is not alone in his West African exploitation.  Several Nigerian families who claim to have had no knowledge of the use of their children as human guinea pigs by pharmaceutical giant Pfizer have sued the company after 11 children died and others were injured from an experimental meningitis drug Pfizer used on the children to test its results[iv].  As the families mourned the passing of their children, CEO Henry A McKinnell mourned the passing of a meager $18.13 million in pay to his bank account in the past year, bringing his total compensation since becoming chief executive of the drug company to $77.38 million[v].

Although General Motor’s shareholders have enjoyed a -15% total return since the beginning of CEO G. Richard Wagoner’s tenure, the executive has enjoyed total compensation of $27 million.  In return, it was announced in June of 2005 that 25,000 GM workers will be receiving not green, but pink slips of paper by the end of 2008.  After years of dismal performance, the executives at General Motors seem to feel as if the solution is to fire 17% of their U.S. workforce.

There exists an obvious disparity here.  The recent rise in CEO compensation, particularly in companies where earnings are less than stellar, is one that requires immediate attention.  It seems that the common practice is for companies to build themselves up by hiring workers for 30 years in cubicle jobs that offer little or no potential for advancement, distributing miniscule proportions of their wealth in the form of “salaries” to said workers and rewarding their upper levels of management and consultancy with hefty compensation packages.  Since there are so few minorities in the upper ranks of the corporate world, it is clear that this newfound expansion of wealth is reserved for an elite few, an in-group within which minorities do not belong.

While one in every three African Americans over the age of 65 called their monthly Social Security checks their only source of income[vi], 65 year old Henry R. Silverman, the CEO of Cendant (the largest global provider of consumer and business services within the travel and real estate realms), received $139.96 million in pay over the past year[vii].

            It is obvious that in the economic boom of the global economy, minorities in the United States have been left behind.  With only a few Fortune 500 companies to our name, it is time the community realizes that those whose dust we are eating will not return to pull us forward.  It is time for us to catch up, and we must do it on our own.