By Camille T. Taiara

SINCE 1994 THE pay increases of top corporate executives in San Francisco have outstripped those of ordinary working people by a ratio of at least five to one, a Bay Guardian survey shows.

The survey, summarized in the "Where's the Money?" charts (at right and on page 26), suggests the gap between the rich and poor continues to grow in San Francisco, as it does nationwide – and supports the argument that the city ought to be looking for new ways to tax the rich before cutting services for the poor.

Adjusted for inflation, the incomes of San Francisco's 10 highest-paid executives increased by 109.5 percent between 1994 and 2001. Many working people's wages, on the other hand, were comparatively stagnant during those same eight years. Secretaries' wages remained virtually unchanged. Teachers' salaries rose by 21.6 percent. Muni drivers' pay increased by 9.2 percent, and unionized janitors' wages increased by a measly 3.6 percent.

Last year the city's top 10 executives brought in, on average, 342 times more money than the secretaries who keep their businesses running and 439 times more than the janitors who clean their office buildings.

It's not as if corporate San Francisco has been suffering, either. Nine of the city's top 10 publicly owned corporations enjoyed profits totaling $12.9 billion in 2001. (One company, the Gap, had a bad year and suffered a loss.)

And then there are San Francisco's billionaires. At least 10 people in this city are now worth more than $1 billion, including Riley Bechtel and Stephen Bechtel Jr., both of Bechtel Corp., who are worth $3.5 billion each, according to a list published in the San Francisco Business Times. Also included in the Business Times' list: Susan Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway, who is good for $2.4 billion, as well as Donald Fisher and Doris Fisher of the Gap and oil baron Gordon Getty, worth $2.1 billion each.

The Bay Guardian findings are consistent with a national trend. In the recently published book Wealth and Democracy, author Kevin Phillips reports that the incomes of the nation's 10 richest CEO's rose by a whopping 4,300 percent between 1981 and 2000. Adjusted for inflation, that figure still comes to 2,223 percent.



"Our whole tax policy has gotten increasingly regressive," explains Riva Enteen, an attorney with the National Lawyers Guild who helped found the 60-organization-strong People's Budget Collaborative five years ago. "From the federal to the state level, percentagewise, the rich have been taxed less. Add to that the increase in corporate welfare – when the government subsidizes the cost of doing business – and that translates into more money for the [executives].

"We need to sharpen our tax policy so the people who have unprecedented earnings pay back a fair share, so the government can deliver services."

On the local level, Enteen points to San Francisco's business-tax settlement last year, in which the city refunded $100 million in taxes to 52 of the highest-ranking corporations rather than face them in court and, in essence, lost out on an extra $25 million it could have garnered from those corporations this year.

"That affected the city coffers," Enteen says. "And it means the city doesn't have funds to increase the pay of city workers."

Were the Board of Supervisors to pass legislation requiring corporations in San Francisco to disclose how much they're paying – and what they're not paying – in taxes, she argues, the city could shape its tax policy more equitably based on those figures. But as it stands, not even the Mayor's Office has access to that information.

"The Bay Guardian numbers are interesting in that they reflect the post-dot-com collapse and several months past Sept. 11," Enteen says. "They show that, even so, some people are still doing quite well. There's unprecedented wealth in the hands of a few people, and that wealth needs to be assessed through progressive tax policy to bring some of it back into the city coffers."

Of course, the figures in these charts are not exact. The top 10 executives' compensations, for example, include profits from sources other than their salaries, such as stock options. The statistics for regular workers' wages are based on data for the greater San Francisco region rather than the city alone. And the profits reported by the top 10 publicly owned corporations are based on slightly divergent fiscal years and accounting practices. But such factors are negligible in the face of the vast discrepancies between the earnings of San Francisco's rich and the salaries of their working-class counterparts. The escalating concentration of wealth in the hands of a few at the expense of the rest of us is clear. E-mail Camille T. Taiara at camille@sfbg.com.

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