We know that thanks to the Republican "trickle-down" economic policy (the idea that what's good for the rich is good for everyone) this country is becoming a very unequal place. Since that policy was initiated in the 1980's, the income of the rich has risen dramatically while worker wages have remained stagnant (and even lost ground when inflation is considered). This has created a vast gap between the rich and the rest of America -- a gap as large as it was just prior to the Great Depression, and a gap that continues to grow.
While workers continue to struggle, corporate CEO's are making a killing. We had been estimating that they make hundreds of times more than the average worker in their company. We now learn that was an underestimate. They make over a thousand times more. Consider this from The Guardian:
The CEO of Marathon Petroleum, Gary Heminger, took home an astonishing 935 times more pay than his typical employee in 2017. In other words, one of Marathon’s gas station workers would have to toil more than nine centuries to make as much as Heminger grabbed in just one year.
Employees of at least five other US firms would have to work even longer – more than a millennium – to catch up with their top bosses. These companies include the auto parts maker Aptiv (CEO-worker pay ratio: 2,526 to 1), the temp agency Manpower (2,483 to 1), amusement park owner Six Flags (1,920 to 1), Del Monte Produce (1,465 to 1), and apparel maker VF (1,353 to 1).
These revelations come thanks to a new federal regulation that requires publicly traded US corporations to disclose, for the first time ever, how much their chief executives are making compared with their median workers. The disclosures are just now starting to flow in.
Up until this year, comparisons of CEO and worker pay have had to rely on the average take-homes of US workers overall – not the pay of workers at individual corporations. Those generalized figures helped us track the soaring trajectory of executive compensation at big US corporations, from 30 times average worker pay in the 1960s to over 300 times more recently.
But headlines around those average figures did next to nothing to slow our CEO pay-hike express. Will the release of the ratios at individual corporations make any more of a difference?
Corporate America must surely think so. Ever since 2010, the year Congress plugged a ratio disclosure mandate into the Dodd-Frank financial reform act, corporate lobbyists have been scheming to delay and repeal that mandate’s implementation. But responsible investors and other activists rallied and kept the mandate in place.
The new ratios offer a benchmark for corporate greed that exposes exactly which firms are sharing the wealth their employees create and which aren’t, knowledge we can use to impose consequences on the corporations doing the most to make the United States more unequal.
Congress should have acted to fix this. But they did just the opposite. They cut taxes radically for corporations and the rich -- a move that will increase CEO and management salaries while doing little to nothing for workers. And while the Republicans are busy giving more to corporations, they refuse to raise the minimum wage (which remains far below a livable wage).Is this the kind of country you want to live in -- a country that gives a few enormous wealth while insuring that workers fall further behind every year? If not, then you need to vote the Republicans out of power this November. They have made it very clear they have no intention of changing their economic policy that favors the rich and punishes everyone else.
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