While 25 million unemployed and underemployed U.S. workers are drowning, CEO pay skyrocketed by 23 percent, for an average salary of $11.4 million in 2010, according to the AFL-CIO Executive PayWatch. Released today, data compiled at PayWatch also show CEOs have done little to create badly-needed jobs, instead sitting on a record $1.93 trillion in cash on their balance sheets.
The 2011 Executive PayWatch features the compensation of 299 S&P 500 company CEOs and provides direct comparisons between those CEOs and the median pay of nurses, teachers, firefighters and others. For instance, while a secretary makes a median annual salary of $29,980, someone like Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf rakes in $18,973,722 million—632 times the secretary’s salary. The pay gap between Wall Street and Main Street has widened egregiously—as recently as 1980, CEOs made 42 times that of blue-collar workers.
(Check out the 2011 Executive PayWatch to read case studies of six CEOs and find out how many firefighters it takes to make the salary of one CEO. You also can compare salaries of nurses, secretaries and others with CEOs and share the results with your friends on Facebook. Click here to share on Facebook.)
Maybe CEOs can’t focus on job creation because they have more pressing issues—like lobbying to repeal key provisions of a financial disclosure reform bill Congress passed last year. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act requires corporations to reveal the CEO-to-worker pay gap—and the Wall Street rulers don’t want to do that. (Click here to urge your member of Congress not to weaken Wall Street reform in any way.)
AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says the AFL-CIO will work hard to defend this historic reform. The brazen attacks by Wall Street lobbyists to undermine reform “surprise and offend me,” Trumka says, “and I think they will surprise and offend most Americans.”
Apparently Wall Street doesn’t want people to know that while working Americans paid for the economic crisis with their jobs, their homes and their retirement savings, these Teflon CEOs escaped unscathed.
CEO pay has helped fuel the rapidly escalating income inequality in this country which has worsened over the past decade to levels not seen since the years before the Great Depression. The increase of income inequality prior to the 2008 financial crisis and the recent recession is striking: Between 1993 and 2008, the top 1 percent of Americans captured 52 percent of all income growth in the United States.
About the Author: Tula Connell got her first union card while she worked her way through college as a banquet bartender for the Pfister Hotel in Milwaukee (she was represented by a hotel and restaurant local union—the names of the national unions were different then than they are now). With a background in journalism—covering bull roping in Texas and school boards in Virginia—she started working in the labor movement in 1991. Beginning as a writer for SEIU (and OPEIU member), she now blogs under the title of AFL-CIO managing editor.
This blog originally appeared in AFL-CIO on April 19, 2011. Reprinted with Permission.
