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INCOME INEQUALITY US income inequality ... Wage gap between CEOs and US workers jumped to 670-to-1 last year, study finds ... Report on 300 top US companies found CEOs making an average of $10.6m, with the median worker getting $23,968 
Supporters of Amazon workers protest in Santa Monica, California, in May 2021. ... Photograph: Frederic J Brown/AFP/Getty Images Original article: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/07/us-wage-gap-ceos-workers-institute-for-policy-studies-report Peter Burgess COMMENTARY During my training as a Chartered Accountant in London in the 1960s I had to do some of the 'grunt work' on tax returns for some of the richest executives in the United Kingdom. At the time these men were considered very wealthy, but by the standards of the last few years they were quite modestly rich. There wealth was measured in the low millions rather than in the tens of billions that is now relatively commonplace in the executive elite and among financiers. Place like the Harvard Business School and Wharton can take some of the credit for the amazing wealth now owned by a fairly large few of the zillionaires ... they have thought through how financialization can work to enable the accumulation of wealth. I almost wrote 'to enable the creation of wealth' but then realized that financialization truly does not create wealth but rather simply moves it around, and concentrates it in more and more. The people who are involved with the creation of wealth ... the creation of value ... do not get the keep much, if any, of the fruits of their labor. Every day, I am reminded that several decades ago, about 50% of US workers earned more than the average wage, and about 50% earned less than the average wage. Today in 2022, about 20% of US workers earned more than the average wage, and about 80% earned less than the average wage. Within the 20% a quite small number have accumulated huge wealth ... tens of billions of dollars of wealth ... and the rest are doing pretty well. This group are very protective of their position and 'go along' with the system as it is. The behavior seems to reflect a certain risk avoidance. If they go along, they will probably maintain their favorable situation, but if they do not, they are most likely going to slide quite rapidly down the wealth hierarchy. This is a conundrum, and understandable ... but morally not at all defensible. The maximizing of inequality in order to achieve ones own personal wealth goals is reprehensible ... but that is what has been going on at least since the 1980s. There are a lot of people who understand what has happened, but few who actually understand (1) how things got this way, and (2) what can be done to fix it. This second, is a real challenge, but without getting the answer to this the unsatisfactory trends for most of the world's people is going to continue. From a moral perspective, this is totally unacceptable. I have used 'data' all my working life better to understand the facts. There are a lot more 'data' now than in my youth but this is not matched by an increase in understanding, but more by a greater use of the 'convenient' data to tell the story most needed by the data user. This behavior has taken over most of the data sector and is very dangerous. The vast majority of the population are being force fed a diet of data that suits those with power and influence for their own purposes. It is scary and must be addressed. In my own small way I am trying to facilitate a change in the direction of better data in support of socio-enviro-economic management metrics ... something I call TrueValueMetrics.org. TVM aims to be relatively simple, and apply not only to the performance and impact of a business unit, but to the performance and impact of all the activities in the totality of the socio-enviro-economic system. In order to be effective, the data must be coherent through multiple perspectives, including that of the actors that make decisions and the actors that implement activities. The top key goal is quality of life for people, followed by environmental sustainability and reasonable economic return on investment. The foundation for all of this exists ... but powerful people (and companies) would prefer what exists today !!!!!!!! Peter Burgess | ||
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US income inequality ... Wage gap between CEOs and US workers jumped to 670-to-1 last year, study finds
Report on 300 top US companies found CEOs making an average of $10.6m, with the median worker getting $23,968 Dominic Rushe @dominicru Tue 7 Jun 2022 00.01 EDT Amazon, the second-largest federal contractor in the sample, amassed $10.3bn in federal contracts. Last month shareholders approved a $212m pay deal for Amazon’s CEO, Andy Jassy, 6,474 times the company’s median pay. The wage gap between chief executives and workers at some of the US companies with the lowest-paid staff grew even wider last year, with CEOs making an average of $10.6m, while the median worker received $23,968. A study of 300 top US companies released by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) on Tuesday found the average gap between CEO and median worker pay jumped to 670-to-1 (meaning the average CEO received $670 in compensation for every $1 the worker received). The ratio was up from 604-to-1 in 2020. Forty-nine firms had ratios above 1,000-to-1. At more than a third of the companies surveyed, IPS found that median worker pay did not keep pace with inflation. The report, titled Executive Excess, comes amid a wave of unionization efforts among low wage workers and growing scrutiny of the huge share buyback programs many corporations have been using to inflate their share prices. US companies announced plans to buy back more than $300bn of their own shares in the first quarter of the year and Goldman Sachs has estimated that buybacks could top $1tn in 2022. Share-related remuneration makes up the largest portion of senior executive compensation and as buybacks generally boost a company’s share price, they also boost executive pay. Senator Elizabeth Warren has called buybacks “nothing but paper manipulation” designed to increase executive pay. The report found that two-thirds of low-wage corporations that cut worker pay in 2021 also spent billions inflating CEO pay through stock buybacks. The biggest buyback firm was home improvement chain Lowe’s, which spent $13bn on share repurchases. That money could have given each of its 325,000 employees a $40,000 raise, according to IPS. Instead, median pay at the company fell 7.6% to $22,697. “CEOs’ pandemic greed grab has sparked outrage among Americans across the political spectrum,” said report lead author Sarah Anderson, director of the IPS Global Economy Project. She cited one recent poll that showed that 87% of Americans see the growing gap between CEO and worker pay as a problem for the country. IPS noted that many of the companies in its sample were also the recipients of large federal government contracts. Forty companies in the sample were awarded $37.2bn in government contracts between 1 October 2019 and 1 May 2022. The biggest recipient was Maximus, a company that manages federal student debts and Medicare call centers, which received $12.3bn in federal contracts. In 2021, Maximus CEO Bruce Caswell collected $7.9m in compensation, 208 times the firm’s median paycheck. Maximus workers have recently staged walkouts over pay and benefits. Amazon, the second-largest federal contractor in the sample, amassed $10.3bn in federal contracts. Last month shareholders approved a $212m pay deal for Amazon’s CEO, Andy Jassy, 6,474 times the company’s median pay. This report offers a number of policy solutions, including actions president Joe Biden could take without waiting for Congress. “The president could wield the power of the public purse by introducing new standards making it hard for companies with huge CEO-worker pay gaps to land a lucrative federal contract,” Anderson said. The report also urges Biden to ban top executives at federal contractors from selling their personal stock for a multi-year period after a buyback. Open PDF: IPS-executive-excess-report-2022.pdf
| The text being discussed is available at | https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/07/us-wage-gap-ceos-workers-institute-for-policy-studies-report and |