US Bosses Now Earn 312 Times the Average Worker's Wage, Figures Show (theguardian.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The chief executives of America's top 350 companies earned 312 times more than their workers on average last year, according to a new report published Thursday by the Economic Policy Institute. The rise came after the bosses of America's largest companies got an average pay rise of 17.6% in 2017, taking home an average of $18.9m in compensation while their employees' wages stalled, rising just 0.3% over the year. The pay gap has risen dramatically, with some fluctuations, since the 1990s. In 1965 the ratio of CEO to worker pay was 20 to one; that figure had risen to 58 to one by in 1989 and peaked in 2000 when CEOs earned 344 times the wage of their average worker. CEO pay dipped in the early 2000s and during the last recession, but has been rising rapidly since 2009. Chief executives are even leaving the 0.1% in the dust. The bosses of large firms now earn 5.5 times as much as the average earner in the top 0.1%.

Comments

A buddy of mine always questions

[rsilvergun]

what good does it to do raise your wages since if seems like prices will just go up to compensate. If the Union gets a 20% raise then the next day the cost of milk goes up 20%, right?

In practice that's not what happens. What's going on there is inflation, and inflation is only a zero sum game when productivity isn't going up. But productivity has gone up non stop for over 100 years. In the 70s wages stopped keeping pace with productivity gains.

What we have now is an oversupply of labor. Supply and demand is a two way street, but it's tough to get folks to acknowledge that because nobody like to think of themselves as a simple commodity. We're all precious, irreplaceable snowflakes. It doesn't help that there's a small group at the top (math majors, surgeons, top athletes) who are. There's a lot of folks who don't want to see those productivity gains distributed more equitably because it's a point of pride for them. At least that's the only explanation I've come up with why so many oppose things like single payer healthcare. Then again I've also noticed a lot of those single payer healthcare opponents qualify for Medicare and/or the VA.... Not that the powers that be haven't noticed and aren't working to eliminate those programs and give themselves the money. But again, I've never met a snowflake that thinks they can melt with the rest of us...