July 25, 2017

Real pay for CEOs rose 937% since 1978, real worker wages up 11%

Popular Resistance - A new report, published by the Economic Policy Institute, shows that while wages for American workers have essentially remained stagnant for decades, CEO pay has soared at an “outrageous” clip.

A study by the Pew Research Center in 2014 found that economic analyses show a “lack of meaningful wage growth.” Looking at five decades worth of government wage data, PRC showed that wages have been flat or even falling since the 1970s, regardless of changes in the economy and job markets.

As PRC states:

“After adjusting for inflation, today’s average hourly wage has just about the same purchasing power as it did in 1979, following a long slide in the 1980s and early 1990s and bumpy, inconsistent growth since then. In fact, in real terms the average wage peaked more than 40 years ago: The $4.03-an-hour rate recorded in January 1973 has the same purchasing power as $22.41 would today.”

Now EPI’s Lawrence Mishel and Jessica Schieder have found that between the years of 1978 and 2016, CEO pay rose 937 percent. Over that same period, worker compensation grew by a measly 11.2 percent.

The CEOs of America’s largest firms made an average of $15.6 million, 271 times the annual average pay of a typical American worker.

According to the report, “The average CEO in a large firm now earns 5.33 times the annual earnings of the average very-high-wage earner (earner in the top 0.1 percent).”

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