Greedy Asshole

I met a friend I hadn't seen in a long time, at - where else? - a wedding dinner. He was working at some really big consulting firm, which was (in)famous for making their junior consultants work ridiculous hours.

This friend of mine had this occasional meeting with the head of the (SouthEast Asia + a few other countries) region. They were asking questions about the company, when my friend piped up with one of the great career ending questions of all time:

"Why do you pay yourself so much when you pay us so little? Why do we get paid so little when (company name) earns so much?"

The table was silent for a little while and all the eyes were on him. The region head looked at the guy and launched into typical bullshit justifications. The company needs the money to invest in the machinery - the backends, the set ups, the stores of knowledge with which you need to run a proper consulting firm. The proceeds from the business get ploughed back into the company and it enables you to participate in more projects.

Yes, yes, yes. But that does not answer the question about why staff remuneration is so skewed. Maybe people don't realise it but I once saw a graph that charted the ratio between the CEO's pay and the lowest paid employee of the firm. They did a nationwide survey in the US, and it was found that whereas in the 60s the ratio was about 1:40, the latest average ratio was something like in the hundreds or the thousands.

I mean, do people seriously believe that feudalism is dead just because the French Revolution took place?

But what the region head said at the end of his argument was more shocking than anything my friend said. He said, "I've been working here for 27 years and I've never been happy with my salary".

I see. So that's why you've been paying yourselves so much, you greedy assholes?

But here I want to qualify what I meant by "career suicide". Anyway it was somebody else at my table who brought up the idea that a statement like this was career suicide.

What is worse, making a statement like the one my friend made, or just sitting back, handing power over to your boss, based on the notion that criticising the amount of money that he makes is career suicide? Is speaking out a greater sin, or the collective human behaviour that turns all of us into willing slaves? There are so few of them, and only hundreds of us. What is this mysterious force that stops us from getting together and hounding all of those parasites out of town? If speaking out against them is a form of impertinence, why is this impertinence a greater sin than the injustice that they're getting paid so much more for the same amount of work than us?