June 5, 2024                                                         Home   Subscribe  Open in Browser

Runaway wealth inequality can sometimes become disturbingly difficult to conceptualize. At moments like that, nothing helps more than the release of the latest stats on corporate CEO compensation, and this week we have some tangible — and enlightening — new figures from the Associated Press.

In 2023, these figures show, average compensation for our big-time chief execs soared 12.6 percent to $16.3 million. Median workers? They saw their wages grow just 4.1 percent. Half the CEOs the AP examined are making at least 196 times more than their median employee. 

All those millions cascading into corporate corner offices are causing real harm to the rest of us, as our Inequality.org co-editor Sarah Anderson points out in the AP’s new CEO pay coverage. Average Americans, Sarah notes, are “feeling the pain of inflation more because they’re not seeing their wages go up enough.”

And those wages are not going up fast enough because chief execs are making decisions that prioritize their own paychecks. We’ve had, as the congressional progressive Ro Khanna puts it, “40+ years of broken economic policy that put profits ahead of working people.”

Chris Mills Rodrigo
for the Institute for Policy Studies’ Inequality.org team

Organizing To Foster an Ever More Vibrant Virtuous Cycle

This week’s frontline face: Sharvonne Walker, a community organizer in Indianapolis who’s helping families achieve economic stability. 

What she’s doing to help create a more equal world: Walker knows from first-hand experience how close many Americans are living to an unexpected crisis that could upend their lives. 

Many politicians and wealthy Americans today would like us to see social programs as a drain on our economy. Walker has the first-hand experience to see the emptiness of that claim. Her own family had to rely on public housing and food assistance when she was growing up. Those programs helped her and her family get back on their feet and continue to live productive lives.

What makes the fight so important to her: “Thanks to the help we got, we give back as good as we received and more — that’s how a healthy system works,” says Walker. “If we help families survive rocky times rather than fall deeper into poverty, all of us benefit as a society.”

“We shouldn’t be cutting our public programs,” Walker adds. “we should be expanding them.”

100+ Progressive Groups Urge Congress to Overhaul the Tax Code in 2025

Most of the federal tax cuts that Donald Trump signed into law in 2017 will be expiring at the end of next year. That reality will force a major congressional battle next year over the future of our tax code, no matter who triumphs in this November’s election. 

Over the past several months, the Institute for Policy Studies has participated in a working group to develop a joint agenda for the Big Tax Debate of 2025. Last week, over 100 groups endorsed this agenda in a full-page ad in the New York Times. 

The 2017 Trump tax legislation, the groups detailed in their letter to Congress, amounted to a “failure on its own terms.” The tax cut failed to deliver promised wage increases for typical workers and failed to “pay for itself.” Instead, this cut further skewed the federal tax code even more sharply towards the wealthy — and seriously eroded tax revenues.

Click the link below to read more about how we can overhaul our tax code to reduce inequality, sustain the investments that can create an economy that works for all of us, and support financial security and opportunities for all Americans.  

The Biden administration recently expanded the number of U.S. full-time employees who qualify for overtime pay by an estimated 4.3 million. The changes will be phased in, with a bump in the overtime pay threshold set to rise to $43,888 in July and then up to $58,656 in January. Not everyone below those thresholds will qualify, since employers can still deny overtime pay for administrative and professional workers. But this is still a step forward for workplace equity. 

Can Democracy and Billionaires Ever Really Coexist?

One person, one vote. The classic essence of democracy. But what if that one person happens to be a fabulously rich? Does that one person actually have just “one” vote? Can we have anything approaching democracy when some among us are sitting on fortunes grander than the rest of us can even imagine? Americans have been actively debating questions like these ever since we entered the era that Mark Twain quite artfully tagged the “Gilded Age.” We never totally ended that gilded epoch. But we came close. Now we could hardly be further away. Inequality.org co-editor Sam Pizzigati has more.

This Billionaire Couple Really Loves Pistachios and Really Hates Unions

This week’s dour deep pockets: Stewart and Lynda Resnick, the California billionaires who own the Wonderful Company, the corporate empire that Forbes has dubbed “the largest agricultural company in the world and one of the largest privately held companies in the United States.”

What has the Resnicks sour: the United Farm Workers campaign to unionize the over 600 workers who labor at the Wonderful Nurseries in California’s Central Valley. Union success at this nursery, notes journalist David Bacon, could speed organizing efforts throughout the huge Wonderful agribusiness complex.

The United Farm Workers this past winter gained bargaining rights at the Wonderful Nurseries, under the terms of the new California labor law that went into effect last year. Now the Resnicks have, the Los Angeles Times reports, “unleashed a nuclear attack” on that law: a lawsuit that seeks to have California’s new unionization process “declared unconstitutional.”

The last word: “If the company has all this money for lawyers and consultants,” notes Rosa Silva, a Wonderful Company worker active in the UFW organizing drive, “they can raise the wages and make conditions better. We’re just asking for what’s fair.”

More Perfect Union, What Apple Doesn't Want You to Know. A look at why negotiations at Apple's unionized store are stalling.

David Sirota, Morgan Harper, and Greg Saunier, What Will It Take to Defeat Ticketmaster? The Lever. A musician and an antitrust expert debate whether a potential breakup of Ticketmaster and Live Nation would really improve an inequitable music industry.

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