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The AFL-CIO this week launched the 2012 Executive PayWatch site—now called CEO Pay and the 99%—which includes the most comprehensive data accessible on 2011 executive pay. All of the data available is searchable by industry, by state and by the top 100 highest-paid CEOs. Check it and help us share it widely.

CEO Pay and the 99% shows that a CEO of a company in the S&P 500 Index, on average, received $12.9 million in total compensation in 2011. That’s a 14 percent raise over the previous year. And that’s on top of a 23 percent increase in 2010.

In stark contrast, the average wage for workers hovered at $34,000 in 2011. Median household income fell $3,700 over the past decade. And those who are employed received an average 2.8 percent raise—barely keeping up with inflation.

The new site also features data on:

Swelling corporate cash stockpiles. Corporations have a record $2.2 trillion in cash on their balance sheets, according to the Federal Reserve. But rather than reinvest this capital to grow our economy and create jobs, CEOs are not deploying these resources.

The widening gap between CEO-to-worker pay. Last year, this ratio of CEO-to-worker pay had widened to an astonishing 380 times. In 1980, CEOs of large U.S. companies made 42 times the average wages of workers.

Mutual funds’ votes on executive pay. Mutual funds wield enormous clout on CEO pay issues in part because of the new “say-on-pay” requirement that shareholders cast an advisory vote on CEO pay. In this new section, investors can look up how their mutual funds voted and ask their mutual funds to vote against runaway CEO pay levels.

The shady world of private equity, which Mitt Romney’s candidacy has brought to light.

You also can take action to rein in out-of-control CEO pay: Send an e-mail to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and urge it to implement the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act’s requirement that public companies disclose their ratio of CEO-to-worker pay.

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This has been reposted from AFL-CIO.

A new study by a team of top economists finds that if the tax rate for the highest-income Americans was pegged at—drum roll please—83 percent—it wouldn’t impact anyone but the “mega-rich.”

When Ronald Reagan and his Republican successors began three decades of hacking away at the taxes the rich paid—once as high as 80 percent—they claimed it would spur unfettered, long-term uninterrupted economic growth for all. Great Britain’s Margaret Thatcher followed the same game plan. Well, say the authors:

Countries that made large cuts in top tax rates such as the United Kingdom or the United States have not grown significantly faster than countries that did not, such as Germany or Denmark.

Along with the tax cuts, the decades-long soaring level of executive pay, stock options and bonuses have given the top 1 percent an even greater share of the nation’s wealth. The authors say that share of the wealth has led to greater influence for the affluent and helped retain their impenetrable shield against tax increases. Even a tiny tax increase on the rich will crash the economy and kill jobs say the wealthy’s best friends—Republican lawmakers and presidential candidates. (more…)

You’ve heard all the reasons given for the economic implosion of 2008: the bursting of the housing bubble, the risky investments of financial firms, the use of incomprehensible financial instruments as get-rich-quick-schemes—all of them the result of a massive agenda of across-the-board deregulation pushed by Republican lawmakers since the 1980s.

But at the root of the behavior that led to the 2008 market crash that nearly took down the economy, according to experts who spoke yesterday at a conference at the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C., is the soaring level of executive pay at the nation’s giant corporations—a system of salary, stock options and bonuses that is not tied to a company’s long-term performance, but rather to the short-term profits that stand to enrich CEOs via the options and bonuses. Consequently, explained AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka at yesterday’s conference, ”Executive Pay and the Dodd-Frank Act,” excessive executive pay led to excessive risk-taking by CEOs and other top officials in corporations and financial institutions.

In 1980, Trumka said, executives at the nation’s largest companies earned about 42 times the level paid the average factory worker, according to an estimate by BusinessWeek magazine at the time. Today, he said, the average CEO at a corporation in the Standard & Poor’s 500 collects a payout that is some 343 times larger than the median paycheck received by the average worker. (more…)

At the Take Back The American Dream conference session titled “Make Work Pay: Why Empowering Workers & Holding CEO’s Accountable is Vital to Economic Growth” Christine Owens of the Nationsal Employers Law Project described to the audience how wages are declining. “Job growth is extremely slow. We have a net deficit over 11 million jobs, and 75% of the jobs that are returning pay between $7.50 and $13.50 an hour.”

We are in a very deep hole, and this explains why personal income is falling as well, in the wage and poverty data. Meanwhile corporate CEO pay has exploded.

What we can do is raise the minimum wage, and make employers pay workers what they have promised to pay. The minimum wage is $7.25. It would be close to $10.50 if it kept up with inflation, and 26% of the workforce makes less than %10.50. But all wages are anchored by this minimum – called a “spill up effect.” So move it up, and index it to inflation. Even Tea Party members support raising the minimum wage.

(more…)

By Sam Pizzigati
Editor, on line weekly Too Much

A consumer alert for soccer moms and doting granddads: Outrageous compensation rewards give corporate executives an incentive to behave outrageously — against you! The story behind the sad demise of a beloved camera.

We’ve come to expect, here early in the 21st century, that business will abuse workers, at every opportunity. We’ve watched corporate leaders downsize and outsource, slash benefits, raid pension funds, and routinely replace full-timers with temps. Such moves have become standard corporate operating procedure.

But we don’t expect corporations to show consumers the same contempt, at least not openly. Corporate execs, behind the curtains, may overcharge and bait and switch. In public, these same execs pay homage to consumer sovereignty.

We consumers have internalized this hypocrisy. We really believe we matter. We assume that corporations will bend over backwards to discover and deliver the products and services that great numbers of us want.

We’re living, in effect, a fairytale. Corporate leaders today care no more about consumers than they do about workers. What do they care about? Maybe we should ask John Chambers, the CEO of high-tech giant Cisco. (more…)

By Sam Pizzigati
Editor, on line weekly Too Much

Taxpayers, once again this year, are subsidizing over-the-top CEO pay by the billions. But now on the table: a promising new proposal that encourages corporations to share that excess — or else.

The chief executives of America’s top 500 companies, Forbes reported last week, saw their pay rise an average 12 percent in 2010.

The week before last, the New York Times looked at 200 top companies and computed the median CEO pay hike for those 200 at 12 percent as well. The week before that, USA Today surveyed 158 big firms and calculated that CEO pay last year rose 27 percent.

In short, after a brief Great Recession interlude, corporate executive pay is cascading again — at the same time average American families, by the millions, are still facing foreclosures, frozen paychecks, and furloughs.

In fact, estimates Forbes, executive pay is now rising at least four times faster than the wages of average workers. (more…)

By Tula Connell
AFL-CIO Managing Editor

While 25 million unemployed and underemployed U.S. workers are drowning, CEO pay skyrocketed by 23 percent, for an average salary of $11.4 million in 2010, according to the AFL-CIO Executive PayWatch. Released today, data compiled at PayWatch also show CEOs have done little to create badly-needed jobs, instead sitting on a record $1.93 trillion in cash on their balance sheets.

The 2011 Executive PayWatch features the compensation of 299 S&P 500 company CEOs and provides direct comparisons between those CEOs and the median pay of nurses, teachers, firefighters and others. For instance, while a secretary makes a median annual salary of $29,980, someone like Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf rakes in $18,973,722 million—632 times the secretary’s salary. The pay gap between Wall Street and Main Street has widened egregiously—as recently as 1980, CEOs made 42 times that of blue-collar workers.

Maybe CEOs can’t focus on job creation because they have more pressing issues—like lobbying to repeal key provisions of a financial disclosure reform bill Congress passed last year. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act requires corporations to reveal the CEO-to-worker pay gap—and the Wall Street rulers don’t want to do that. (Click here to urge your member of Congress not to weaken Wall Street reform in any way.)

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka says the AFL-CIO will work hard to defend this historic reform. The brazen attacks by Wall Street lobbyists to undermine reform “surprise and offend me,” Trumka says, “and I think they will surprise and offend most Americans.” (more…)

By James Parks
AFL-CIO Senior Writer

Here’s another reason to do away with runaway CEO pay.  A study shows bloated CEO pay can make the boss mean.

The study examined the corporate behavior of 261 companies and found a close correlation between pay inequality and poor treatment of workers. In companies where CEOs made much more than their average workers, the companies were more likely to underfund pensions or cut corners on health and safety. Often, according to the study, the bosses engaged in a cost-benefit analysis, calculating that a fine would be a cost of doing business, compared with the profits they could make.

“You end up basically thinking of those at the bottom as numbers,’’ Sreedhari Desai, a Harvard research fellow who co-authored the study, told The Boston Globe columnist Joanna Weiss. “You feel somehow that they aren’t even worthy of the normal people that you’d meet. They’re disposable.’’ (more…)

By Sam Pizzigati
Editor, “Too Much” 

If you started last year on the payroll at Verizon or Alcoa or Boeing or IBM, you may have found yourself off the payroll by year’s end. All these American corporate giants — and dozens more — have slashed their payrolls by the thousands since the Great Recession first kicked into gear. 

But if you started last year in the chief executive suite of any of these companies, you ended the year with more than your job. You ended the year with many more new millions in your pocket.

In fact, details a just-released new report from the Institute for Policy Studies, CEOs at the 50 U.S. firms that have fired the most workers since our current economic meltdown began “took home nearly $12 million each on average in 2009,” a windfall 42 percent higher than the year’s overall CEO pay average. 

These layoff-happy CEOs, Executive Excess 2010 makes plain, didn’t just line their own pockets while they were throwing employees out the door. These CEOs, in effect, threw people out the door to line their own pockets. 

The layoffs these CEOs engineered, the new Executive Excess explains, “in no way rate as an inevitable consequence of red corporate ink.” Nearly three quarters of the nation’s corporate layoff leaders — 72 percent — actually ended last year in the black. Together, the top 50 layoff firms “enjoyed a 44 percent average profit increase in 2009.” (more…)

By Les Leopold
Author, “The Looting of America”

The August unemployment numbers are ugly, yet again. Nearly 30 million Americans are still jobless or forced into part-time jobs. The Bureau of Labor Statistics official unemployment rate is 9.6%. It’s borader and more telling jobless rate (U6) of 16.7% confirms that we’re stuck in our own version of the Great Depression. We’ll need more than 22 million new jobs to bring us back to full-employment. Happy Labor Day.

To get out of this quagmire we’ll have to face up to two fundamental facts:

1. We really are in the midst of a horrific jobs crisis. All the happy talk about the economy being on the road to recovery is just plain old denial. We’ll never find jobs for all the people who desperately need them until we recognize that this employment crisis poses a clear and present danger to our republic. Modern capitalist societies require full employment. When we don’t have it for long periods of time, chaos ensues. What’s missing in Washington is a sense of urgency. Denial is dangerous — and an insult to the unemployed.

2. We must face up to the real causes of this mess. Unfortunately, a lot of Americans are succumbing to a wrong-headed narrative that has been pushed into our heads:

“We Americans sank ourselves in debt. We consumed more than we produced. We bought homes we couldn’t afford and used them as ATMs. Of course Wall Street did its part by offering us mortgages they knew we couldn’t really afford. The government also contributed mightily by pushing Fannie and Freddie, the giant housing agencies, to underwrite “politically correct” loans to low-income residents who shouldn’t have been buying homes at all. In short, we all are to blame.” (more…)