CEO Pay

Low-Wage Corporations Fleece Their Workers To Massively Inflate CEO Pay

September 18, 2024 Sarah Anderson, In These Times. Educate! CEO Pay, Class Struggle, Finance and the Economy, Wages, Worker Rights and Jobs

Most people believe in fair pay for honest work. So why aren’t low-wage workers better paid? After 30 years of research, I can tell you that it’s not because employers don’t have the cash — it’s because profitable corporations spend that money on their stock prices and CEOs instead. Lowe’s, for example, spent $43 billion buying back its own stock over the past five years. With that sum, the chain could have given each of its 285,000 employees a $30,000 bonus every year. Instead, half of Lowe’s workers make less than $33,000. Meanwhile, CEO Marvin Ellison raked in $18 million in 2023. The company also plowed nearly five times as much cash into buybacks as it invested in long-term capital expenditures like store improvements and technology upgrades over the past five years.

Low Wage Corporations Spent Half A Trillion Inflating CEO Pay

September 6, 2024 Sarah Anderson, Scheer Post. Educate! CEO Pay, Corporations, Finance and the Economy, Wages, Worker Rights and Jobs

Most of us believe in fair pay for honest work. So why aren’t low-wage workers better paid? After 30 years of research, I can tell you it’s not because employers don’t have the cash. It’s because profitable corporations spend that money on their stock prices and CEOs instead. Lowe’s, for example, spent $43 billion buying back its own stock over the past five years. With that sum, the chain could’ve given each of its 285,000 employees a $30,000 bonus every year. Instead, half of Lowe’s workers make less than $33,000. Meanwhile, CEO Marvin Ellison raked in $18 million in 2023. The company also plowed nearly five times as much cash into buybacks as it invested in long-term capital expenditures like store improvements and technology upgrades over the past five years.

Could We Actually End The CEO Defense Contractor Gravy Train?

June 6, 2023 Sam Pizzigati, Inequality.org. Create! CEO Pay, Military Industrial Complex, Taxes, wealth inequality, Weapons makers

Could corporate CEOs anywhere in the universe have a deal much sweeter than U.S. defense contractor chiefs? The CEO at CybeCys, Inc., a Texas-based defense contractor, might quibble with that question. He isn’t feeling all that much sweetness these days. Last month, federal prosecutors announced a deal that will have this CEO and CybeCys pay over $283,000 in penalties and damages for cheating on two Covid-era federal loan programs. The CybeCys CEO seems to have transferred hefty chunks of taxpayer dollars into his own personal investment accounts and used those dollars, prosecutors charge, to buy up “securities, exchange-traded funds, and cryptocurrency.”

A Climate Stat We Can’t Afford To Overlook

August 17, 2021 Sam Pizzigati, Counterpunch. Educate! Capitalism, CEO Pay, climate crisis, wealth inequality

Ace researchers dropped two blockbuster reports on us last week. The first — from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC — hit on Monday with a worldwide thunderclap. UN Secretary-General António Guterres is dubbing this first report’s findings “a code red for humanity” — and for good reason. Our global thermometer is already averaging 1.1 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. If current trends continue, we’ll reach 3 degrees this century. Where do we need to be? To avert “catastrophe for people and natural systems worldwide,” we can’t afford to let global temperatures rise over 1.5 degrees. This week’s second blockbuster report arrived Tuesday, sans the thunderclap. Few media outlets chose to give this second study — the Economic Policy Institute’s latest look at U.S. CEO pay — any high-profile real estate.

Corporations Pumped Up CEO Pay While Their Low-Wage Workers Suffered

May 13, 2021 Sarah Anderson, Inequality.org. Educate! CEO Pay, Pandemic, Wages, wealth inequality

During the pandemic, low-wage workers have lost income, jobs, and lives. And yet many of the nation’s top-tier corporations have been fixated on protecting their wealthy CEOs, even bending their own rules to pump up executive paychecks. A new Institute for Policy Studies report finds that 51 of the country’s 100 largest low-wage employers moved bonus goalposts or made other rule changes in 2020 to give their CEOs 29 percent average raises while their frontline employees made 2 percent less. Among these 51 rule-rigging companies, average CEO compensation was $15.3 million in 2020, while median worker pay was $28,187 on average. The average CEO- worker pay ratio: 830 to 1.

Become A Socialist With This CEO Pay Calculator

August 11, 2020 By Joel Cunningham, Life Hacker. Educate! CEO Pay, Socialism, Wages, wealth inequality

You’ve probably heard, anecdotally, that Jeff Bezos earns your salary in some absurdly short amount of time—but do you know exactly how short? Well, now there’s a tech CEO salary calculator from SimpleTexting that can give you the infuriatingly precise answer. You can also use it to figure out how quickly Elon Musk could pay off your mortgage, or that Mark Zuckerberg could pay off the average American’s $35,359 in student debt in 8 1/2 minutes. Does Jeff Bezos make enough to cover your living expenses in more or less time than it would take you to pledge yourself to the fight to burn capitalism to the ground?

The Infinite Greed, Power And Controls Of Giant Corporations

August 9, 2020 Ralph Nader. Educate! Apple, CEO Pay, Corporate greed, Corporatism

The combination of greed and power often spin out of control and challenge the enforceable rule of law and the countervailing force of the organized civic community. When greed and power are exercised by giant multinational corporations that escape the discipline of the nation-state, the potential for evil becomes infinite in nature. Enough is never enough. Global giant companies, aided and abetted by their corporate attorneys and accountants, can literally decide how little taxes they are going to pay by shifting profits and expenses among different tax haven countries such as Ireland, Luxembourg, and Panama.

Why Are CEOs Paid 361 Times More Than Their Average Employees?

May 28, 2018 By Paul Ausick, 24/7 Wall Street Educate! CEO Pay, Inequality, Jobs and Wages, New Economy

In 1980 the average CEO-to-worker pay ratio was 42:1. In 2017 the ratio was 361:1. Total CEO compensation averaged $13.94 million last year, compared to just $38,613 for the average production and non-supervisory worker. We’ve all seen numbers like this so many times now that we barely even blink at a new set. There is, however, new research that may partly explain why this gap has gotten so wide. The CEO-to-worker pay data were reported Wednesday morning by the AFL-CIO in an update to the union’s Executive Paywatch database and website. The data were compiled from disclosures by companies of the ratio of CEO pay to the median worker’s pay required for the first time last year in federal financial filings. New research by Harvard Ph.D. candidate Nathan Wilmers, published Wednesday by the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, indicates that increased pressure from large corporate buyers suppresses wages for the workers in the buyer’s network of suppliers. Thus, large corporate buyers like Boeing and Walmart exercise outsized influence on the wages of their suppliers’ workers.

US CEO’s Paid More Than Foreign CEO’s, And They Pay Their Workers Less

May 28, 2018 By Sam Pizzigati, Inequality Educate! CEO Pay, Inequality, New Economy, Worker Rings and Jobs

PayWatch report, thankfully, provides that context: Average worker pay in the United States last year increased just 2.6 percent. In other words, as the PayWatch study notes, “the imbalance in our economy between the pay of CEOs and working people is worsening.” And that rates as a big deal. But to really understand how staggering America’s CEO-worker pay imbalance has become, we need to widen our field of comparative vision, from domestic to global. And what do we find when we take that step? Simply this: CEOs in the United States make significantly more than their counterparts in our peer nations, and American workers make significantly less.

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