{"id":40375,"date":"2022-06-07T13:13:00","date_gmt":"2022-06-07T13:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/ceos-are-enjoying-huge-paydays-while-their-workers-struggle-to-pay-bills\/"},"modified":"2022-06-07T13:13:00","modified_gmt":"2022-06-07T13:13:00","slug":"ceos-are-enjoying-huge-paydays-while-their-workers-struggle-to-pay-bills","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/ceos-are-enjoying-huge-paydays-while-their-workers-struggle-to-pay-bills\/","title":{"rendered":"CEOs are enjoying huge paydays while their workers struggle to pay bills"},"content":{"rendered":"<div data-paragraph-id=\"paragraph_AF2C7A27-C4E2-A5DD-6A77-3C17B1CD4CB8\">The typical low-wage worker&#8217;s pay didn&#8217;t keep pace with inflation last year at more than a third of the companies reviewed by the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank.  IPS &#8216;survey included the 300 publicly traded companies with the lowest median pay for workers.<\/div>\n<div data-paragraph-id=\"paragraph_80F9B12A-4CDE-AD16-F634-3C17B1CED1AA\">Consumer prices have spiraled up to 40-year highs above 8% this spring.  While many workers have seen fatter paychecks as a result, few have managed to keep pace with inflation &#8211; a dynamic that&#8217;s frustrating consumers and starting to weigh on spending. <\/div>\n<p>Executives, meanwhile, haven&#8217;t felt nearly the same bite from inflation. <\/p>\n<p>CEO pay at the companies cited in the report soared 31% &#8211; driving the average pay gap to 670-to-1, up from 604-to-1 in 2020. <\/p>\n<div>\n<p>Put another way: CEOs at these firms got a $ 2.5 million raise.  Low-wage workers got a $ 3,500 raise.  The average CEO made $ 10.6 million a year.  The average low-wage worker took home just under $ 24,000.<\/p>\n<div class=\"el__embedded el__embedded--standard\">\n<div class=\"el__storyelement--standard el__article--embed\">\n<div class=\"el__article--teaseimage\"><noscript><img alt=\"The economy is going into the toilet.  Let's hope no one flushes it!\" class=\"media__image\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/cdn.cnn.com\/cnnnext\/dam\/assets\/220526132648-01-us-recession-risk-large-169.jpg?ssl=1\" data-recalc-dims=\"1\"\/><\/noscript><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p>&#8220;We just haven&#8217;t seen any significant progress towards pay equity,&#8221; Sarah Anderson, director of the institute&#8217;s Global Economy Project, told CNN Business.<\/p>\n<p>When the pandemic hit in 2020, &#8220;corporate boards zealously protected their much more than ample CEO paychecks, even as their workers lost jobs, income, and lives,&#8221; researchers wrote.  In 2021, &#8220;corporate leaders shifted to new CEO pay-inflating tactics,&#8221; including spending billions on stock buybacks and inflating prices of consumer goods to maintain wide profit margins, the report says. <\/p>\n<p><h3>Buybacks and price hikes<\/h3>\n<\/p>\n<p>Last year, companies in the S&#038;P 500 repurchased a record $ 882 billion of their own shares.  That number is on track to reach $ 1 trillion in 2022, according to Goldman Sachs.<\/p>\n<p>At the 106 companies where researchers found median worker pay did not keep pace with the 2021 inflation rate of 4.7%, 67 spent on stock buybacks, a controversial maneuver that inflates a company&#8217;s share price, and, consequently, juices executive pay.  They&#8217;ve been a thorny issue since they were legalized in 1982 &#8211; prior to that, they were considered stock manipulation. <\/p>\n<p>The IPS report called out big-box retailers specifically for spending massive sums on buybacks while cutting median worker pay. <\/p>\n<p>The White House has proposed new rules intended to curb stock buybacks as part of its $ 5.8 trillion budget released in March, but those changes are unlikely to win bipartisan support. <\/p>\n<p>CEO pay is always top tier, but the widening gap between executives and their workers has come under growing scrutiny from progressive lawmakers. <\/p>\n<p>During the first year of the pandemic, CEO pay overall jumped 19% &#8211; even as many of their businesses ground to a halt, according to the Economic Policy Institute, which tracks 350 of the largest US companies.  The latest EPI report shows top CEOs were paid 351 times as much as a typical worker in 2020.<\/p>\n<p><h3>&#8216;Fundamentally unfair&#8217; <\/h3>\n<\/p>\n<p>Critics say the pay gap not only about bad optics &#8211; it&#8217;s also bad for business. <\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I think most Americans are outraged because they just see it as fundamentally unfair, but there&#8217;s also a very strong business argument that these extreme gaps are demoralizing for workers,&#8221; says Anderson, who co-authored the IPS report.  &#8220;When so many companies are facing staffing challenges and unionization, why wouldn&#8217;t they look at trying to address these gaps as a way to have more peaceful and productive relations with their employees?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>The report urges President Biden to wield executive power to roll out new standards for federal contractors that would make it hard for companies with huge CEO-worker pay gaps to land lucrative federal contracts.    <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>    .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The typical low-wage worker&#8217;s pay didn&#8217;t keep pace with inflation last year at more than a third of the companies reviewed by the Institute for Policy Studies, a progressive think tank. IPS &#8216;survey included the 300 publicly traded companies with the lowest median pay for workers. Consumer prices have spiraled up to 40-year highs above &hellip;<\/p>\n<p class=\"read-more\"> <a class=\"\" href=\"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/ceos-are-enjoying-huge-paydays-while-their-workers-struggle-to-pay-bills\/\"> <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">CEOs are enjoying huge paydays while their workers struggle to pay bills<\/span> Read More &raquo;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"default","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[8],"tags":[18353,114],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/cdn.cnn.com\/cnnnext\/dam\/assets\/220526145242-us-discount-department-retail-store-0507-super-tease.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40375"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40375"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40375\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/harchi90.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}