"Meanwhile, employee productivity relative to enrollment and degrees awarded has been relatively flat in the midst of rising compensation".
The rising compensation costs are driven in large part by costlier health care benefits, so those lucky workers who do have jobs do not exactly feel richer.
But it doesn't really address the explosion in inequality at the top of the income distribution, much of which emanates from rising compensation in the financial sector — where Powell spent much of his career — or the slow growth in wages earned by recent college graduates.
Reformist politicians in Florida, Colorado, Washington, D.C. and New Jersey are confronting teachers' unions and the sacred rights of tenure and rising compensation.
"Given Google's aggressive hiring plans, rising compensation expense, and significant advertising spend on Chrome and other Google products, we expect EBITDA margin to decline in 2011 and 2012," Morgan Stanley analyst Scott Devitt said in a note.
And that may explain why a pay practice that has contributed mightily to ever-rising compensation — the use of the corporate peer group — remains intact at most companies.
Vocational rehabilitation has grown significantly in Australia since the 1980s in response to rapidly rising workers' compensation costs and following the introduction of vocational rehabilitation into workers compensation legislation [ 6].
On paper, the days of rapidly rising executive compensation appear to be ending.
Rising executive compensation has been something of a constant in modern capitalism — and so far, at least, managers of mutual funds haven't had much of an effect on it.
Steve Bent, the executive director of the Texas Association of Responsible Nonsubscribers, which advocates for private injury benefit systems, said with rising workers' compensation rates possibly motivating more companies to opt out, insurance companies could be pressured to keep premium rates low.
