On May 24, 2019, Daniel Moritz-Rabson writes on Newsweek:
Median CEO pay increased $1.1 million last year, while private-sector worker wages increased just 84 cents an hour.
A survey by executive compensation consulting firm Equilar showed that the median boss was offered compensation of $18.6 million in 2018, an increase of 6.3 percent from 2017. Worker pay increased less. The 84 cents an hour raise for private sector-employees was a 3.2 percent rise.
Elon Musk, who received $2.3 billion in 2018, received the most compensation year. His pay package was the “biggest ever,” according to The New York Times, which cited unnamed compensation experts.
David Zaslav, the CEO of Discovery, earned $129 million, while Nikesh Arora, the CEO of cybersecurity company Palo Alto Networks, earned $125 million and Safra Catz and Mark Hurd, the co-CEOs of Oracle earned $108 million each.
The disparity in pay further extends a vast gap between the compensation offered to executives and workers. Last year, the AFL-CIO Executive Paywatch said that the CEO pay at S&P 500 Index companies was 361 times more than that of workers in 2017.
Larry Mishel, distinguished fellow at the Economic Policy Institute, highlighted the compensation gap between workers and CEOs in a report that analyzed 2017 payments.
“High CEO pay does not reflect correspondingly higher output or better firm performance,” Mishel wrote. “CEOs are getting more because of their power to set pay…if CEOs earned less or were taxed more, there would be no adverse impact on output or employment.”
“This has been going on for a while,” Mishel told Newsweek.
“It’s a lack of good governance. A lot of it is being driven by stock prices, mostly because there’s a flawed sense of pay for performance.”
“When the stock market rises, it’s as though every CEO has reinvented the firm,” he added, noting that a higher marginal tax rate “for those at the very top” would reduce incentives to pay CEOs large amounts of money.
Bernie Sanders Comments:
Remember when Donald Trump promised the American people a $4,000 raise from his tax cuts? That was a lie. Instead, private-sector worker wages went up by just 84 cents an hour last year. Meanwhile, median CEO pay increased $1.1 million. When we are in the White House, we are going to repeal Trump’s tax breaks for the wealthy, raise wages for working people and make the top 1 percent and large corporations pay their fair share.
Gary Reber Comments:
