Makes a few interesting points, but I think it downplays the issue a little bit. Can’t say I blame them though, given the hype.

I am in no way trying to serve as an apologist for high executive pay levels. After more than 20 years in the field of executive compensation I have seen numerous examples of inappropriate pay for executives – not only in amount, but in reason and in form. Billions of dollars have been paid to thousands of executives who have ruined companies and workers’ lives. I have seen executives join a company shortly before a takeover and get millions in “change in control” payments. (Those payments, too, often appear in the executive pay calculations but not in average worker calculations and tend to inflate the ratio a bit.) 

I also have seen numerous examples of inappropriate pay for nonexecutives – sales representatives that made far too much pay due to a flawed incentive plan; a receptionist earning more than double the market rate because she had been with the company for decades and there was no pay cap for any position; software engineers that joined a company at just the right time and cashed out their stock options just before the stock price crashed and the company went out of business due to a poorly developed software product. I have a friend who has a knack for joining companies shortly before they do major restructurings and layoffs; she’s made hundreds of thousands of dollars in retention bonuses and severance pay yet always found her next job right away…or contracted back to the company that just laid her off at double her previous pay rate, on top of the severance pay. (If that kind of data was captured in the “average worker pay” calculation, which it is not and never will be, the ratio might look a little different.)