CEOs work harder every hour than their wage slaves do every season.

[TaraJo]

Depends on what you mean by "deserve". Did they do a large enough amount of work as a CEO to merit such a large amount? Probably not.

Have you listened to how they talk about the poor people of the world? The idea there sure seems to be that they didn't do enough work to deserve more than minimum wage. Why can't we apply the same logic to the people at the upper end of that spectrum?

CEO's get paid large amounts; it's the way things are, mainly because there are precious few CEOs, and even fewer good CEOs. Running a large corporation isn't a job that just anyone could do; most of us (myself included) would fail if we tried it.

And, yet, many of those CEO's still get paid obscenely large amounts even when they run their company into the ground. The executives that ran the banks into the ground, necessitating the bail outs from 2008? They still got pretty hefty wages, with those bail outs going for many of their bonuses. Hostess went bankrupt shortly after their executives got big fat bonuses themselves, while those same executives were demanding their labor force take a pay-cut. Naturally, they only blamed the labor when the company went under.

The good news though, is that you can directly influence the amount of money a CEO gets paid. Just stop buying products / services from their company, and get enough people to do the same.

Not always an option, especially in rural areas. If you don't want to contribute money to the oil companies, well, too bad because you still need to drive a car to function and every time you fill up the tank, you contibute to them. You want to go shopping without contributing to Walmart? Good luck if Walmart is the only store within 30 miles. It gets worse when poverty is added tothe mix and people have plenty of other options, we just can't really afford any of them.