T-Mobile CEO Salary Equals Pay of 2,000 Call Center Workers

Yesterday Amber Diaz, a former T-Mobile US employee who was unjustly fired for exercising her rights to organize a union, stood up and asked a question that’s been on the minds of so many of her coworkers: How can T-Mobile pay its CEO millions of dollars, while its call center workers earn so little they are forced to rely on government assistance?

Diaz boldly stepped up to the microphone at the company’s annual 2014 shareholders meeting to point out that last year T-Mobile CEO John Legere raked in $29 million — after just one year in the position. That’s the equivalent of the combined pay of about 2,000 T-Mobile call center workers.

But Timotheus Höttges, CEO of T-Mobile’s parent company Deutsche Telekom, retorted that Legere’s pay is competitive and even low by industry standards — sidestepping the fact that CEO pay is out of control.

 It’s outrageous that a full-time minimum wage employee would have to work 580 hours just to equal a single hour of Legere's pay. A single hour!

 American CEOs pocketed, on average, $11.7 million in 2013, according to the 2014 AFL-CIO Executive PayWatch. Compare that to what an average worker earned: $35,293. That means CEOs were paid 331 times as much as an average worker.

It was the very first time that the median pay package for a CEO crossed the $10 million mark.

At the same time, the divide between workers' pay and productivity continues to escalate. From 1973 to 2011, worker productivity grew 80.4 percent, while the inflation-adjusted median hourly compensation for those workers grew just one-eighth of that amount, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

Workers are a big part of why T-Mobile is profitable and grabbing an epic share of the wireless market.

Isn’t it time employees share in that success?