EPI: High CEO pay saps U.S. elsewhere
Don’t worry about America’s CEOs. They’re doing fine.

In 2015, chief executive officers in our nation made an average of $15.3 million in compensation, which is 276 times the annual average pay of the typical U.S. worker.

“While the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio is down from 302-to-1 in 2014, it is still light years beyond the 20-to-1 ratio in 1965,” said Lawrence Mishel and Jessica Schieder of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), in a report issued July 12 on the state of CEO compensation.

They said the drop in 2015 primarily reflects a dip in the stock market and not any change in how CEO pay is being set. Therefore, CEO pay can be expected to resume its sharp upward trajectory when the stock market resumes rising.

“Exorbitant CEO pay means that the fruits of economic growth are not going to ordinary workers since the higher pay does not reflect correspondingly higher output,” the report said. “From 1978 to 2015, inflation-adjusted CEO compensation increased 940.9 percent, 73 percent faster than stock market growth and substantially greater than the painfully slow 10.3 percent growth in a typical worker’s annual compensation over the same period.”

The Economic Policy Institute researchers said CEO pay is growing a lot faster than corporate profits, as well as the pay of the top 0.1 percent of wage earners, and the wages of college graduates. “This means that CEOs are getting more because of their power, not because they are more productive, or have special talent, or more education,” Mishel and Schieder said. 

They suggested public policy changes, including solutions that would limit and reduce incentives for CEOs to extract economic concessions without hurting the economy. Among them:

•Reinstating higher marginal income tax rates at the very top,

•Removing the tax break for executive performance pay,

•Setting corporate tax rates higher for firms that have higher ratios of CEO-to-worker compensation

•Allowing greater use of “say on pay,” which allows a firm’s shareholders to vote on top executives’ compensation.

As Trump is chosen, his workers picket

LAS VEGAS (PAI)—It may have been a coincidence, but some 600 workers at Donald Trump’s Las Vegas casino hotel, members of Unite Here, picketed the place on July 20, the day their boss won the Republican presidential nomination. The reason? The man who declares he’ll “Make America great again!” refuses to make low-paid workers at the casino great by ordering his managers to bargain a first contract there.

Joined by members of AFSCME, who held their convention blocks away, the Trump Las Vegas workers detailed the low pay and lousy working conditions that pushed them to unionize with Culinary Workers Local 226 and Bartenders Local 165, both within Unite Here’s largest U.S. local, in Las Vegas. “Donald Trump has made a career of enriching himself at the expense of working people, including his own employees in Las Vegas,” the unions said.

The union also announced the Trump hotel agreed to settle a labor law-breaking claim by Local 226 by paying $11,200 in back wages to two pro-union workers it illegally retaliated against. The National Labor Relations Board regional office worked out the settlement.

VP pick Pence opposed auto rescue

LANSING – Michigan AFL-CIO President Ron Bieber said GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump's pick for vice president, Mike Pence, "stabbed working people in the back" for opposing the federal $15 billion auto rescue when he was a congressman in 2008.

“By voting against the auto rescue, Mike Pence voted to let Michigan’s auto industry crumble. Without that rescue package, hundreds of thousands of Michigan workers would’ve lost their jobs, and our economy would’ve gone right down the drain. The fact that Donald Trump, who has already suggested closing Michigan auto plants, would pick Mike Pence as his running mate just shows that he’s totally unfit to be president, and would be a complete disaster for Michigan’s economy.”