Vernon Jordan says CEO pay has gotten 'out of hand'

"I think it's gotten a tad out of hand," Jordan, 72, told the Post's Steven Pearlstein. "And I think it's gotten out of hand not so much as it relates one CEO to another, but as it relates to where the CEO is and where the rest of us are." 

Some reports indicate that CEOs earn more than 300 times the average worker, compared to a 30 to 1 ratio in 1970. Executive compensation has been a major topic of discussion in Washington after some corporate executives at AIG, Merrill Lynch and other companies bailed out by the government have insisted on paying high salaries and bonuses to top employees.

"I've seen a lot of pushing back" by boards of directors, Jordan said. "I've seen a lot of really stupid efforts on the part of one or two CEOs who've asked for things that they did not get," he said.

"They're human beings with all of the problems and potentialities of other human beings," Jordan said. He acknowledged that he liked many of the CEOs he has worked with and has sometimes tried to warn them not to overdo it.

Jordan, 72, is a former executive director of the United Negro College Fund and former president of the National Urban League in the 1970s. He later went on to become a close friend and adviser to President Bill Clinton when he served in the White House.

Jordan also talked about his definition of leadership by citing an example of E.D. Nixon, a civil rights leader who brought Martin Luther King Jr. into the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955.