Compensation Disparity Quotes

When you overpay small people you frighten them. They know that their merits or activities entitle them to no such sums as they are receiving. As a result their boss soars out of economic into magic significance.

If you're injured in an automobile accident, and you sue the driver, you get much more for your injury than if you're fighting for your country. There's a double standard here.

Why administrators are respected and schoolteachers are not: An administrator is paid a lot for doing very little, while a teacher is paid very little for doing a lot.

CEOs pretty much pick the boards that give them salaries and bonuses. That's one of the reasons why the CEO-to-payment [ratio] has so sharply escalated in this country in contrast to Europe. (They're similar societies and it's bad enough there, but here we're in the stratosphere. ] There's no particular reason for it.

I'm just asking for a fair shake. You see a lot of these guys, a lot of these other champions making what they're making. I'm not trying to take anything away from them, but I feel like I'm one of the more exciting fighters under contract in the UFC.

If America is so oppressively evil, how did it happen that this black professor, with embarrassingly meager qualifications, found herself at the pinnacle of American academic life as president of Harvard? How is it that, having been forced to resign—not, as she claims, because of racism but because of her own shortcomings, including extensive plagiarism—she will stay on as a professor at the university with a salary of more than $900,000 a year? The cost of a four-year Harvard education these days is estimated at $334,000. Instead of firing her for cause, it will be as if Harvard had decided that a dozen undergraduates’ painfully assembled tuitions are to be allocated each year to finance Ms. Gay’s opulence and soothe her bruised feelings.

It does say something about a society when those who sue physicians and hospitals make as much or more money than those who heal disease. It says something about a society when it glorifies and rewards those who litigate while it demonizes and punishes those who produce the drugs and devices that keep it citizens alive and well.

Now 'pay equity' has everything to do with pay and nothing to do with equity. It’s based on the vague notion of 'equal pay for work of equal value,' which is not the same as equal pay for the same job.

Most of my life, everybody made more money than I did at the places I worked. In fact, when I've been an employee, I have never been anywhere close to being the highest paid person there, never. I was working hard. I was working hard. I was doing things I didn't want to do, that I thought I should do. I was getting up every day, going to work, did not phone in sick. Striving. Trying to get ahead, you know, doing what Obama says, working hard and applying myself and trying to get ahead. There was always somebody, there were always a lot of people that earned more than I did.

The life of a woman is worth half of that of a man [in Iran]. If a terrorist attacks me and my brother on the street and we are both injured the same, the compensation he receives is twice as much as the compensation that I would receive.

Military pay has been allowed to lag behind to the point where career enlisted men with families to feed have been forced to resort to food stamps.

People think that athletes have it great, and we do in a lot of regard, but universities make a hell of a lot of money off of players. You don't get a free education: you work full-time year round for five years for an education you could pay for three times over if you just got your market value.

I wrote much because I was paid little. I had no great desire to leave a literary name behind me.

How long will it be necessary to pay City men so entirely out of proportion to what other servants of society commonly receive for performing social services not less useful or difficult?

There's a pretty equitable distribution in the restaurant industry of how money gets paid, except for in the kitchen. The kitchen is the lowest-paid group of people.

Maitre d's are at the financial spigot of the restaurant, meaning they control who gets in and who doesn't, but aside from that, they don't do anything. And yet they get paid as much as the highest-paid people in the place.