US CEOs earn 335 times more than average worker: Study
US chief executive officers (CEO) of the largest American companies on average made 335 times more money than US rank-and-file workers last year, according to a new study.
The average production and non-supervisory worker made around $36,900 last year, up from roughly $36,000 in 2014, the AFL-CIO reported Tuesday, based on US government reports.
The figures are issued annually by the AFL-CIO, the largest US federation of labor unions.
Meanwhile, CEOs of S&P 500 companies made $12.4 million on average in 2015, down from $13.5 million in 2014.
In 1980, the average S&P 500 CEO made 42 times what the average rank-and-file worker earned, a ratio that by 1990 had risen to 107 times as much.
Union leaders said the figures showed how salaries do not favor the average worker. "The income inequality that exists in this country is a disgrace," AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said in a statement.
Heather Slavkin Corzo, director of the AFL-CIO's office of investment, said in an interview that recent wage increases are meager given how worker pay has steadily fallen behind that of top executives.
Starting in 2017, the US Securities and Exchange Commission will require public companies to disclose the ratio of the pay of their CEOs to the median compensation of their employees.
The high levels of CEO compensation have drawn criticism from Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, as well as Republican candidate Donald Trump, in the current US presidential campaign.
Economic inequality has also been a major focus for President Barack Obama, arguing that the dream of upward economic mobility is breaking down and the growing income gap is a “defining challenge of our time.”
Even as the US economy has rebounded from the Great Recession, which technically ended in mid-2009, nearly all the income gains have gone to the top 1 percent of Americans.
In the first three years of the recovery, 91 percent of income gains went to the wealthiest 1 percent of households, a group with incomes above roughly $400,000, economics professor Emmanuel Saez of Berkeley University in California has found.
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