By now, you’ve probably seen the headlines. A warehouse employee at a massive Kimberly-Clark distribution center in Ontario, California was arrested for arson. The 1.2-million-square-foot facility — which serves roughly 50 million people with paper goods, diapers and personal care products — was destroyed. Six-alarm fire. 175 firefighters. Complete devastation.
But the headline that captured our interest wasn’t the fire itself. It was the video that circulated on social media, in which a voice — allegedly the employee’s — could be heard saying:
“All you had to do was pay us enough to live. All you had to do was pay us enough to live.”
Let me be clear: what allegedly happened here is a crime. A serious crime. And I am not here to excuse it, minimize it, or romanticize it. The impact on the community, on co-workers, on the supply chain serving 50 million households — that’s real and significant.
But by now, I hope you’ve read enough of my Lead With Inclusion writings to know we ARE going to unpack what that moment represents. Because that phrase — all you had to do was pay us enough to live — is not the language of a person who felt seen, heard, or valued. It’s the language of someone who reached a breaking point. And breaking points don’t happen overnight and they definitely don’t occur in a vacuum.
That same week, Oracle announced it was laying off 30,000 employees. And in the same breath, the company unveiled a compensation structure for its incoming CFO worth $29 million.
$29 million. For one person. While 30,000 others were handed their walking papers.
These two stories aren’t unrelated. They’re part of the same conversation.
Lead With Inclusion
The gap is not an accident. It’s a choice.
Here’s the data: In 2024, CEOs at S&P 500 companies earned, on average, 285 times more than the median worker at their company. That’s up from 268-to-1 the year before. At the 100 largest low-wage employers in the country, that ratio ballooned to 632-to-1 — a nearly 13% increase in just five years. The CEO of Starbucks? His compensation came in at 6,666 times what the median Starbucks employee made. Six thousand, six hundred and sixty-six times!
Does that make you angry? It should.
Between 1978 and 2024, typical worker pay grew 26%. CEO compensation, over that same period, grew 1,094%. Productivity grew 80% during that time — and workers saw almost none of those gains.
This is not a market correction. This is not an inevitable byproduct of capitalism. This is a series of intentional decisions made by leaders — at the board level, at the executive level — that consistently answer the question “Who gets the value?” in exactly the same way: the people at the top.
A FlexJobs survey of more than 2,200 U.S. workers conducted earlier this year found that nearly 70% of workers said CEOs could not handle their jobs. When asked why, the top answers revolved around compensation inequity, lack of flexibility, and the feeling that leadership decisions — layoffs, return-to-office mandates, pay freezes — are made by people who have never had to live with the consequences of those decisions.
That’s what the “Great Workplace Divide” looks like from the frontline.
What I need leaders to hear is this is an inclusion issue. Specifically, it is an Accountability Consistency failure. One of the five dimensions I measure in the Leadership Reality Check — my free self-assessment for leaders — is whether leaders hold themselves to the same standards they hold their teams. Whether the rules apply to everyone. Whether the sacrifices are shared.
When a company announces thousands of layoffs while simultaneously handing an executive a multi-million-dollar compensation package — that is not accountability. That is not fairness. And it is not leadership.
It’s the organizational equivalent of saying: your effort matters, but you as an individual do not.
Be An Inclusive Leader
Leaders: the distance between you and your frontline is a leadership problem.
I want to be direct about something. The Kimberly-Clark warehouse story is extreme. Arson is extreme. But the conditions that create that level of desperation? Those are not extreme. Those are showing up every day in workplaces across this country, and most leaders have no idea because they’ve stopped looking.
Or worse — they’re looking at the wrong metrics.
I talk to leaders regularly who are proud of their engagement scores. Who tell me their people are “fine.” Who point to their wellness app, their flexible Fridays, their free lunch on the last Thursday of every month.
And then I ask: do you know what your lowest-paid employee makes? Do you know if they can afford to live within 30 minutes of where they work? Do you know what happens to their family if you lay them off in a restructuring that was announced on the same day your C-suite equity was refreshed?
Maybe take a moment to ask those questions of your executive team . . . I’ll wait.
Inclusive leadership requires Inclusion and Fairness — not just in the abstract sense of making sure everyone has a seat at the table. It requires leaders to reckon with the lived reality of the people they lead. And that includes financial reality.
Here’s what inclusive leaders do differently:
1. They close the information gap. They don’t wait for an exit survey or an arson investigation to find out how people feel. They create regular, structured ways to hear from employees at every level — not just managers. They actually listen to what comes back.
2. They audit the pay story they’re telling. Not just compensation bands. The full story. What is your lowest-paid employee making? What is your CEO-to-median-worker pay ratio? Is that a story you’d be comfortable sharing publicly? If not, it’s a story that needs to change before someone else tells it for you.
3. They tie accountability to the top, not just the bottom. One of the most damaging things a leader can do is enforce high standards for frontline workers while shielding executives from consequences. If there are layoffs, what is leadership giving up? If there’s a pay freeze, does it apply at every level? Accountability Consistency means the standards apply everywhere — or they apply nowhere.
4. They treat compensation as a reflection of values. Pay is not just an HR function. It’s a values statement. Every time a leader signs off on a compensation structure, they’re answering the question: who matters here? Make sure your answer reflects what you actually believe.
I’m not saying every company needs to pay its CEO the same as its warehouse worker. That’s not the argument. The argument is that the gap has to be explainable. It has to be defensible. It has to be something you could look your lowest-paid employee in the eye and account for.
Right now, for too many companies, it isn’t.
And when the gap becomes indefensible — when people can’t afford housing, can’t afford groceries, can’t afford to get sick — leaders shouldn’t be surprised when the frustration finds an outlet.
Take Action
For leaders:
Before your next compensation review, ask your HR team to pull your CEO-to-median-worker pay ratio. If you don’t know it, find out. If you know it and haven’t addressed it, make a plan. Not because it’s legally required — because it’s the right thing to do, and because the alternative is a workforce that is quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) building resentment.
For employees and DEI champions:
You’re allowed to name this. Pay inequity is an inclusion issue. Compensation disparity disproportionately impacts women, people of color, and frontline workers. When you’re in spaces where these decisions are being made — or where you have influence over the people making them — bring the data. Name the gap. Advocate for transparency. The conversation will continue to be uncomfortable if we continue to let disparity sit in comfort.
For everyone:
Not sure where you or your organization stands on inclusion, fairness, and accountability? The Leadership Reality Check is a free five-minute self-assessment that measures the gap between how leaders perceive themselves and how their teams actually experience their leadership. It covers Accountability Consistency, Inclusion and Fairness, Psychological Safety, Communication Transparency, and Change Clarity.
Take the Leadership Reality Check and find out where you are — before your employees find a more dramatic way to tell you.
Until next time,
Stacey
