Employees At Major US Corporations Must Work 1,000 Years To Earn Annual CEO Pay: New Report

'At Major US Corporations, Employees Would Have to Work 1,000 Years to Earn What CEOs Made in One: Report.' "Tax penalties on extreme CEO-worker pay gaps would encourage large corporations to narrow their divides." Common Dreams, Sept. 30, 2019.

At the 50 publicly traded U.S. corporations with the widest pay gaps in 2018, the typical employee would have to work at least 1,000 years—an entire millennium—to earn what their CEO made in just one." That's according to Executive Excess 2019: Making Corporations Pay for Big Pay Gaps, a new report from the Institute for Policy Studies.
https://ips-dc.org/report-executive-excess-2019/



-- The CEO-worker pay gap for McDonald's Corp last year was 2,124-to-1, according to the Institute for Policy Studies. CEO Stephen Easterbrook made more than $15 million while the company's workers average $7,473.

The IPS report (pdf) was published Monday, the same day as Democratic presidential primary candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) unveiled his plan to raise the corporate tax rate for companies that pay CEOs at least 50 times more than median workers.
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Institute for Policy Studies @IPS_DC
Today @BernieSanders released a plan to tax companies with big CEO pay gaps. Our new report by @Anderson_IPS found 50 U.S. publicly traded corps have gaps >1000 to 1.

That's right—1000 years for a worker to make what their CEO did in just 1.
report: https://ips-dc.org/report-executive-excess-2019/ …
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For the country's top 50 public companies with the most sizable pay gaps last year, the median worker pay averaged just over $10,000 while median CEO pay averaged $15.9 million, says the IPS report, which relied in part on federally required disclosures.

Other key findings from the report include: Among S&P 500 firms, nearly 80 percent paid their CEO more than 100 times their median worker pay in 2018, and nearly 10 percent had median pay below the poverty line for a family of four.
S&P 500 corporations as a whole would have owed as much as $17.2 billion more in 2018 federal taxes if they were subject to tax penalties ranging from 0.5 percentage points on pay ratios over 100:1 to 5 percentage points on ratios above 500:1.

The firms with the widest pay gaps span various industries, from retailers and apparel manufacturers to fast food, technology, and auto companies. Among the worst offenders: Telsa, with a 40,668:1 pay gap; Abercrombie & Fitch Co., with a 3,660:1 gap; Mattel, with a 3,408:1 gap; Align Technology, with a 3,168:1 gap; and Yum China Holdings, with a 2,731:1 gap.

Others on the top 50 list include Gap, Chipotle Mexican Grill, Williams-Sonoma, McDonald's Corp., Estee Lauder Companies, Foot Locker, Walt Disney Co., Norwegian Cruise Line, T-Mobile, Ralph Lauren, Barnes & Noble Education, Walmart, Starbucks, The Coca-Cola Co., and AMC Entertainment.

The IPS report asserts that massive pay gaps between workers and chief executives help drive U.S. inequality, undermine business efficiency and effectiveness by sapping employee morale, and endanger both democracy and the economy. An annual Economic Policy Institute analysis published last month found that the average take-home pay of chief executives at the largest 350 U.S. companies in 2018 was $17.2 million, 278 times that of the average worker.

* Federal data released last week showed that income inequality in the United States hit its highest level ever recorded in 2018, contrary to President Donald Trump's recent claim that "inequality is down."

Similar to Sanders' plan, IPS proposes using taxation to help prevent exorbitant CEO pay and combat rising U.S. inequality. According to the report: Tax penalties on extreme CEO-worker pay gaps would encourage large corporations to narrow their divides—by lifting up the bottom and/or bringing down the top of their wage scales. Such reforms would also give a boost to small businesses and employee-owned firms and cooperatives that spread their resources more equitably than most large corporate enterprises.

These tax penalties have even greater currency in light of the 2017 Republican tax legislation, which slashed the corporate tax rate from 35 to 21 percent. Republican leaders promised that corporations would invest their windfalls to boost working families. Instead, U.S. companies announced a record-setting $1 trillion in stock buybacks, a maneuver that serves only to enrich wealthy shareholders and top corporate executives...

Read More, https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/09/30/major-us-corporations-employees-would-have-work-1000-years-earn-what-ceos-made-one
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- IPS Report: Executive Excess 2019: Making Corporations Pay for Big Pay Gaps, Sarah Anderson | Sam Pizzigati

- Introduction: For two full years now, publicly held corporations in the United States have had to comply with a federal mandate to report the gap between their CEO and median worker compensation. The resulting disclosures, this report makes clear, have produced truly staggering statistical results.

Americans across the political spectrum have been decrying the yawning gaps between CEO and worker compensation for several decades now. Yet Americans still, the research shows, vastly underestimate how wide these gaps have become. Today, with corporations required to disclose their pay ratios, the public can finally see the actual size of pay gaps at individual firms. These excessively wide compensation gaps hurt us on three major fronts:
•Corporate pay gaps help drive extreme inequality in the U.S.
•Wide pay gaps undermine business efficiency and effectiveness
•Runaway CEO pay endangers our democracy and the broader economy

- Key Findings:

•At the 50 publicly traded U.S. corporations with the widest pay gaps in 2018, the typical employee would have to work at least 1,000 years to earn what their CEO made in just one..
•Among S&P 500 firms, nearly 80 percent paid their CEO more than 100 times their median worker pay in 2018, and nearly 10 percent had median pay below the poverty line for a family of four.
•S&P 500 corporations as a whole would have owed as much as $17.2 billion more in 2018 federal taxes if they were subject to tax penalties ranging from 0.5 percentage points on pay ratios over 100:1 to 5 percentage points on ratios above 500:1.
•Walmart, with a pay gap of 1,076 to 1, would have owed as much as $794 million in extra federal taxes in 2018 with this
penalty in place, enough to extend food stamp benefits to 520,997 people for an entire year..
•Marathon Petroleum, with a 714-to-1 gap, would have owed an extra $228 million, more than enough to provide annual heating assistance for 126,000 low-income people.
•CVS, with a 618-to-1 ratio, would have added a revenue stream that could have provided annual Medicare prescription benefits for 33,977 seniors.
•The report also includes the most comprehensive available catalog of CEO pay reform proposals.

- 5Download Full Report3
More, https://ips-dc.org/report-executive-excess-2019/