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Switzerland had a vote on this in 2013. Max would be 12x the min. The motion lost thanks to corporate propaganda.
But there is the shining example in the Basque region of Spain... in Mondragón, the highest and lowest paid workers in Mondragón, for example, remains about six to one.
The problem of this is always the same. Contractors. Is your janitor holding the wage of your CEO down? Easy fix, you are the CEO. Fire the janitor and hire a cleaning company. Since the employees of the cleaning company are not your employees, their wages are no longer relevant.
At some point, the CEO can just have its own company of 1 employee (himself) which owns 100% of the stakes of the real company, and he can also be CEO of the real company. The real company would just pay massive amounts to the CEO company for "IP" or "consulting".
This policy can be implemented voluntarily by companies, but I don't think a government can make a law to implement this policy without obvious loopholes.
If you had a minimum wage and defined maximum wage in terms of that, you'd bypass this issue.
The "creating shell companies to get around laws" and "outsource to contractors to get around employee protections" points are still problems of course. I suspect the most realistic way of dealing with it is making it unprofitable.
Shell companies are already used to evade tax. That does not necessarily mean we should abolish tax as perhaps calcopritus is suggesting (I can't tell).
Mind you it is arguable that a wealth tax or land tax should replace income tax. That would make the tax dodging more difficult.
Yes, and I hate it, but I'm not sure I have a workable solution.
I think it's a good idea, but it'll be a hard one to implement
Taxing wealth is simpler to implement than taxing work. Political will is the obstacle.
I don't say to abolish tax. With tax, however, you can set taxes on the transactions made for evading taxes. You can't set a maximum wage on foreign companies though.
A clue would be to see how the following was implemented (from the same article):
A referendum in [that same] year to give shareholders a binding say over executive pay and ban golden handshakes and parachutes was overwhelmingly backed by voters.
None of that would matter if Switzerland also set a minimum wage.
I don't see what Switzerland has to do with any of this. And why it would be fixed if Switzerland set a minimum wage.
I told you: Switzerland is the only country to have held a referendum on maximum wages.
But how would setting a minimum wage fix the loopholes of setting a maximum wage. That makes no sense unless you explain further.