CEO for $144K? No thanks.

Okay, couldn't help but post this article about nonprofit executive salaries in San Francisco. The city is considering limiting executive salaries of city-funded NFP's to six times the salary of the organization's lowest-paid employee. I personally think this is absolutely ridiculous...on so many levels!! My frustration with the proposal turned to anger when I started to read the 100+ comments on the article. Most people seem to agree with the proposal.

The Executive Director of the San Francisco Symphony is mentioned in the article. His salary is ~$360K and he runs an organization with an operating budget of ~$55M. An organization, like the Symphony, that employees full-time staff at minimum wage (possibly janitorial staff, etc.) would have to reduce the CEO's salary to $144K. Major nonprofit organizations need to provide competitive compensation packages to attract talented, competent executive management in order to run these sophisticated operations. That is not going to be possible when executive salaries are capped at $144K. Where's the incentive?

One blogger provided interesting perspective, "Why not just hire six janitors to manage the organization?". At least then we'd see a decrease in the unemployment rate, right? You can't compare minimum wage workers with executive directors, so why should their salaries correlate?

~Mark