CEO Pay Boom

A Bloomberg analysis found that chief executives of American companies already make 265 times the amount of money an average worker is paid—the largest CEO-worker income gap in the world.

Last year's CEO-to-worker compensation ratio, calculated by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), was 271-to-1, with the chief executives of American companies seeing an average of $15.6 million in annual compensation. The EPI report notes that "regardless of how it's measured, CEO pay continues to be very, very high and has grown far faster in recent decades than typical worker pay," and "exorbitant CEO pay means that the fruits of economic growth are not going to ordinary workers."

"CEOs of the biggest publicly traded U.S. companies averaged $14.3 million in annual pay, more than double that of their Canadian counterparts and 10 times greater than those in India," according to Bloomberg. While India ranked second on Bloomberg's CEO pay-to-average income ratio, Indian chief executives made about a tenth of their American counterparts' incomes, averaging $1.46 million annually.

EPI president Lawrence Mischel and research assistant Jessica Schieder found that CEO compensation rose "by 807 or 937 percent (depending on how it is measured—using stock options granted or stock options realized, respectively) from 1978 to 2016." They argue that "exorbitant CEO compensation...has fueled the growth of the top 1 percent incomes" at the expense of "the vast majority of workers."

"Simply put, money that goes to the executive class is money that does not go to other people. Rising executive pay is not connected to overall growth in the economic pie," Mishel explained, as Common Dreams previously reported. "We could curtail the explosive growth in CEO pay without doing any harm to the economy."