PayWatch: At WalMart, 1,372 Minimum Wage Hours = One CEO Hour (And It's Getting Worse)

http://www.commondreams.org/further/2014/04/15-3



PayWatch: At WalMart, 1,372 Minimum Wage Hours = One CEO Hour (And It's Getting Worse)
by Abby Zimet
04.15.14 - 10:25 PM

Ever more appalling economic news, with the AFL-CIO's 2014 online database Executive PayWatch tracking CEO pay - average $11.7 million - that's now 331 times what the average worker makes, and 774 times that of minimum wage workers, thus earning the U.S. by far the world's largest wage gap. Using state-by-state data and cool interactive graphics, it highlights five low-wage companies, for example contrasting WalMart CEO Michael Duke's $20,693,545 pay with the $12,000 earned by a full-time worker who has to rely on public assistance for her kids. Those same companies who whine they can't afford to raise wages are also earning more off workers than ever before, thus "cannibalizing their own consumer base." Last year, they made $41,249 in profits per employee, a 38% increase and more than three times what their beleaguered employees earn for themselves in order to, you know, feed their children. Elsewhere, the news is just as bad: Palo Alto in California's Silicon Valley, where 92% of the homeless lack shelter, just passed a law making it a crime to sleep in a parked car, citing "quality of life" issues, and no not for the homeless. Oklahoma's GOP Gov. Mary Fallin just signed a bill banning cities from raising minimum wages or enacting paid sick leaves because yup that'll save their economy. And members of al-Qaeda are said to have hatched a coordinated plan to "sit back and enjoy themselves" while "America as we know it gradually crumbles under the weight of its own self-inflicted debt and disrepair,” a plot said to be "already well under way." From The Onion.