The 100 Largest Low-Wage Employers Have Spent $341 Billion on Stock Buybacks Since 2020
A new report reveals how stock buybacks have inflated CEO paychecks and widened pay gaps at the 100 largest low-wage corporations.
Overpaid CEOs have a very good friend in the giant mutual fund BlackRock. The world’s largest money manager owns stock in thousands of firms across the country, and when it comes time for shareholders to have their annual say on these firms’ executive pay proposals, BlackRock almost never votes “no.”
This kind of rubberstamping of excessive pay plans helps explain why the gap between CEO and worker pay remains at the staggering level of 335-to-1.
And yet this practice appears to be just hunky dory with the vast majority of BlackRock shareholders. At the Wall Street firm’s annual meeting in Manhattan on May 25, only 4 percent voted in favor of a proposal to put more muscle into the firm’s approach to CEO pay voting.
However the man behind the proposal, investor and philanthropist Stephen Silberstein, still declared victory. To find out why, read the full article at The Nation.
