CEO pay has skyrocketed 1,460% since 1978
CEOs were paid 399 times as much as a typical worker in 2021
Report • By Josh Bivens and Jori Kandra • October 4, 2022
What this report finds: Corporate boards running America’s largest public firms are giving top executives outsize compensation packages that have grown much faster than the stock market and the pay of typical workers, college graduates, and even the top 0.1%. In 2021, we project that a CEO at one of the top 350 firms in the U.S. was paid $27.8 million on average (using a “realized” measure of CEO pay that counts stock awards when vested and stock options when cashed in and ownership is taken). This 11.1% increase from 2020 occurred because of rapid growth in vested stock awards. Using a different “granted” measure of CEO pay (which counts the value of stock awards and options when announced (or “granted” rather than realized), average top CEO compensation was $15.6 million in 2021, up 9.8% since 2020. In 2021, the ratio of CEO-to-typical-worker compensation was 399-to-1 under the realized measure of CEO pay; that is up from 366-to-1 in 2020 and a big increase from 20-to-1 in 1965 and 59-to-1 in 1989. CEOs are even making a lot more than other very high earners (wage earners in the top 0.1%)—almost seven times as much. From 1978 to 2021, CEO pay based on realized compensation grew by 1,460%, far outstripping S&P stock market growth (1,063%) and top 0.1% earnings growth (which was 385% between 1978 and 2020, according to the latest data available). In contrast, compensation of the typical worker grew by just 18.1% from 1978 to 2021.
Why it matters: Exorbitant CEO pay is a contributor to rising inequality that we could restrain without doing any damage to the wider economy. CEOs are getting ever-higher pay over time because of their power to set pay and because so much of their pay (more than 80%) is stock-related. They are not getting higher pay because they are becoming more productive or more skilled than other workers, or because of a shortage of excellent CEO candidates. This escalation of CEO compensation and of executive compensation more generally has fueled the growth of top 1% and top 0.1% incomes, leaving fewer of the gains of economic growth for ordinary workers and widening the gap between very high earners and the bottom 90%. The economy would suffer no harm if CEOs were paid less (or were taxed more).
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现在的体制当然不利于工会这样的蓝领，工会也没有想摧毁整个旧体制， 只是想让其中的某一块失能来争取自己一个团体的利益。如果没有这样的工会，会不会产生以摧毁旧体制为目标的更激进的组织呢。美国现在的劳工利益并不是凭空而来的，美国劳动节源自1984年芝加哥铁路工人罢工遭军队镇压的屠杀事件，美国的劳工权益并不是资本家的恩赐，真是美国劳工自己争取来的。当然工会和左派政治家形成了某种选票利益集团那是更后面的事情了