Quotes about Salary

Tom: Executive compensation. You feeling any better about it?

Warren: (LAUGHTER) Well, I-- I-- I feel fine with people making a lot of money for doing a great job. I mean, you know, the people in your field that do a great job make a lot of money. (LAUGHTER) ….

Yeah. But-- what-- what I object to is the people that the-- the biggest payday of their life is the day that they leave a company from which they failed, or-- or where they get paid automatically big sums. If you want the shot at the brass ring-- if you want a shot at making tens of millions of dollars a year, if you flop, why in the world should you be making $5 million a year, or $3 million a year? That-- it's-- pay for performance is fine, you know. Pay for showing up is not-- with the-- with the huge goodbye present, you know-- or-- or bonuses that are not tied to real performance, I think that's terrible.

I think it's not good for a company in terms of its own bottom line to allow too great a gulf to open up between the compensation of the boss at the top and everybody else. Because what is it that holds a company together, that makes the average worker feel that he or she is part of an enterprise that they have a common fate, that it is necessary to put in the extra mile to make sure that that company works? It's the sense that everybody is working together, that there is not too great a gulf between people at the top and people at the bottom. The best companies in this country, the best companies, try to encourage a sense of teamwork, of common enterprise, of everybody in the same boat together. You cannot do that if the CEO is earning 140 times what the average worker in that company is earning.