What about the exponential growth in separation between upper management wages and everyone else in the company?
What about it? Sometimes CEOs get paid more than they ought to, sure, but let's say you halved, or even quartered their pay. Or hell, top out their pay to something ridiculous like $100,000 a year, and you used all the money you saved on raises for all of your employees.
Now, if you're a company like McDonald's, whose CEO makes $8.75 million a year, and has 1.7 million employees, you can now afford to pay all of your employees $5.09 more. Not per hour,
per year. CEO/upper management pay isn't the problem. They're on the small, pointy part of the pyramid, and taking their pay away from them isn't really going to help you afford to pay your employees more. It will make it hard to find good managers, though.