This is called pay compression and it bothers executives who believe in maintaining hierarchy.
In response to an American Management Association survey of 613 organizations, of which 154 were corporations with more than $1 billion in sales, 76% reported problems with compression. Yet only a few percentage points divided the organizations expressing concern from those that do not. For example, the average earnin difference between first-line production supervisors and the highest paid production workers was 15.5% for organizations reporting compression problems, and only a little higher, 20%, for those not reporting such problems. In the maintenance area, the difference vas even less a 15.1% average earnings difference for those who said they had a problem versus 18.2% for those who said they did not. Furthermore, for a large number of companies claiming a compression problem, the difference between levels was actually greater than their official guidelines stipulate.
What was most striking to me, however, was how great the gap