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Friday, June 17th, 2022

Wage gap between CEOs and US workers jumped to 670-to-1 last year, study finds

Author:     Dominic Rushe
Source:     The Guardian (U.K.)
Publication Date:     Tue 7 Jun 2022 00.01 EDT
 Link: Wage gap between CEOs and US workers jumped to 670-to-1 last year, study finds
Stephan:   Since 1978 CEO pay has risen by 940% while worker compensation has gone up 12%. When wealth inequality becomes that great people in both groups literally live in different worlds. If you are making a million dollars or more a year, your experience of $5 a gallon gas and hundred dollar fill-ups is very different from someone who is an average worker making $25,000 a year. This situation exists because in American society profit is the only social priority; fostering wellbeing is a marginal priority. Until this disparity changes America as a country will continue to decline.
Amazon, the second-largest federal contractor in the sample, amassed $10.3bn in federal contracts. Last month shareholders approved a $212m pay deal for Amazon’s CEO, Andy Jassy, 6,474 times the company’s median pay. Credit: Frederic J Brown / AFP /Getty

The wage gap between chief executives and workers at some of the US companies with the lowest-paid staff grew even wider last year, with CEOs making an average of $10.6m, while the median worker received $23,968.

A study of 300 top US companies released by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) on Tuesday found the average gap between CEO and median worker pay jumped to 670-to-1 (meaning the average CEO received $670 in compensation for every $1 the worker received). The ratio was up from 604-to-1 in 2020. Forty-nine firms had ratios above 1,000-to-1.

At more than a third of the companies surveyed, IPS found that median worker pay did not keep pace with inflation.

The report, titled Executive Excess, comes amid a wave of unionization efforts among low wage workers and growing scrutiny of the huge share buyback programs many corporations have […]

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