Equal pay is an important concept but must be given fuller meaning than merely ensuring outrageous equal pay for top private executives who are already living large. Public utilities manage to provide adequate compensation to management without in general gouging the workers and customers. Meanwhile, Wall Street utility Duke Energy’s Lynn Good has never had it so good.
Duke Energy CEO Lynn Good made $21.4 million last year, an increase of 55 percent from the year before and her highest ever as chief executive, according to the company’s proxy filing released Friday.
Good’s total compensation included a base salary of $1.34 million and $17.2 million in stock awards. The year before, her base salary was $1.29 million, and her stock awards totaled $9.12 million.
The Charlotte-based utility, complying with a new federal requirement for public companies, this year disclosed how much more Good makes than the average Duke employee.
www.charlotteobserver.com/...
Interestingly, Duke Energy’s stock price has gone down 20 percent over the last six months, so not even stockholders can be too impressed.
Poor residents who can barely pay their utility bills clearly are getting the short end of the stick. They get to pay for the cleanup of arsenic-laden ash piles left behind by burning coal. Rank-and-file utility workers themselves are also being left behind by the corporate ruling class. According to the Charlotte Observer, “In 2017, Good’s compensation was 175 times more than the median compensation of approximately $122,000 for other employees.“
Give the people within Duke Energy’s service areas democratic control of their own utilities. Privatizing how we turn on the lights sets us up for piracy. That a few of the pirates have different body parts is not equality and not democracy.