Workers should help set top bosses' pay, Ed Miliband has said.
The Labour leader demanded a staff member sit on remuneration committees deciding how much executives of big firms should receive.
Speaking to the Social Market Foundation in London, he said: "This simple reform would help forge a new compact between workers and employers, building trust that salaries at the top are deserved, that long-term decisions are being made."
He said the move would spark "a revolution in transparency about pay for those at the top so shareholders and others can come to a view about what is justified".
Mr Miliband said during a wide-ranging speech that the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams and Barclays chief executive Bob Diamond had addressed economic themes he raised in his speech to Labour's annual conference seven weeks ago.
In a reference to anti-capitalist protesters camped outside St Paul's Cathedral in London, the Labour leader said: "It shouldn't surprise us that people are looking for new answers because we live at a time of unprecedented uncertainty and insecurity.
"But today I want to argue that this is not simply because of the more obvious moral case, that has rightly stirred people's anger, but also an essential economic case.
"That our argument for a new, more responsible, productive capitalism is hard-headed - not soft-hearted. It is based on how we pay our way in the world, build long-term wealth and deliver rising living standards for the majority of people."
Mr Miliband attacked rules which he claimed helped people and firms get rich through "short-term returns" rather than "the productive creation of long-term value".
Criticising regulations which "led to a distribution of rewards increasingly skewed between those at the top and the rest", he said: "That inequality did not just have bad consequences for our society; it had real consequences for our economy as well."
