Bertolini’s been a little schizy. I’ve read about him doing some really annoying shit, but he also does things like this. Great! More CEOs should change their pay structure:
One CEO has taken a step that could help fend off Thomas Piketty’s nightmare vision of rising wealth inequality: He’s giving thousands of his workers a raise.
Aetna Chairman and CEO Mark Bertolini announced on Monday that the health-insurance company will be raising wages for its lowest-paid employees. Starting in April, the minimum hourly base pay for Aetna’s American workers will be $16 an hour, according to a company press release.
The 5,700 workers affected by the change will see an average pay raise of about 11 percent. The lowest-paid workers, who currently make $12 an hour, will get a 33-percent raise.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Bertolini recently requested that Aetna executives read Capital In The Twenty-First Century, by the French economist Piketty. The book, which has been hailed as the “most important book of the twenty-first century,” warns that the gap between the haves and the have-nots is heading toward Gilded Age levels of inequality and calls on the world’s largest economies to fix the problem.
The oligarchy and the Capitalist class are really feeling the heat.
“…..in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the process of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character that a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift and joins the revolutionary class……” Marx, 1848, The Manifesto.
Tick, tick, tick.
We’ve been here before. In the first decade of the twentieth century the oligarchs suddenly found that they had lost the monopoly on labor action violence and seeing the handwriting on the wall many large employers supported small workplace reforms like shortened hours, overtime pay and workers compensation.
Then the economy collapsed around the world throwing millions out of work and causing a series of workers revolutions. We call those combined revolutions World War Two.
It was only after 50 million people were killed that the oligarchs decided to set up a few socialist programs to shut the masses up.
Now the oligarchs (1%) are using the Republicans and the European conservative parties to snatch it all away.
Tick, tick, tick.
A little late to the dance Mr. Bertolini. With Rethugs in charge, we will see the rest of America plunged into desperate poverty. When we start burning the 1% in the street someone will remember Mr. Bertolini’s magnanimous gesture.