September 4, 2024                                                         Home   Subscribe  Open in Browser

We hope you had a restful Labor Day. May you be returning re-energized for the fight to end extreme inequality!

Our just-released 30th annual Executive Excess CEO pay report offers plenty of fighting fodder. This latest edition zeroes in on the 100 S&P 500 firms with the lowest median wages, a group we’ve dubbed the “Low-Wage 100.” 

Our blockbuster finding: These 100 corporations have blown over half a trillion dollars over the past five years on a financial scam to inflate CEO pay at the same time their workers were struggling to put food on the table. 

Just how perverse have the priorities of these low-wage firms become? Nearly half of these major corporations have been spending more on stock buybacks than they’ve been spending on technology upgrades, property improvements, and all other long-term investments combined. 

“The data in this report reveals,” as I told the Guardian last week, “how CEOs are focused on their own personal short-term windfalls rather than long-term prosperity for their workers or even for their own companies.”

Much more data — and signs of hope — from our new report below.

Sarah Anderson
for the Institute for Policy Studies’ Inequality.org team

Real Life Experiences at America’s Corporate Low-Wage 100

This week’s frontline face: Emily Guerra, a former Dollar General worker in Canton, Oklahoma.

What she's doing to help create a more equal world: Guerra is raising the alarm about working conditions at Dollar General, a company that pulls in huge profits but spends almost nothing from that profit haul on staff or improving stores.

Guerra made just $14.75 per hour, on a wildly inconsistent schedule, yet was expected to run Dollar General’s Canton store all by herself without any meaningful training. At every turn, she found herself encountering dangerous tasks and spoiled food.

Dollar General CEO Todd Vasos, meanwhile, pocketed nearly $10 million last year, 521 times as much as his company’s typical worker. Dollar General also wasted $9 billion on stock buybacks that enrich only top execs and shareholders.

What makes this fight so important: “I saw up close how a business that’s focused on exploiting employees to make those at the top even richer isn’t just bad for workers like me, but for customers as well,” Guerra recently noted on Inequality.org. “And anyone who’s worked for one of these low-wage companies can tell you Dollar General is hardly unique.”

Americans of All Political Stripes Demanding Fixes to Executive Excess 

This year’s annual Institute for Policy Studies Executive Excess report mixes staggering stats on corporate pay disparities with hopeful signs of change. One major source of optimism: all the new poll data showing that Americans across the political spectrum are fed up with overpaid CEOs and want solutions. 

One recent survey, for instance, found widespread support for a tax hike on corporations with CEO-worker pay gaps of more than 50 to 1. Some 89 percent of Democrats, 77 percent of Independents, and 71 percent of Republicans in the poll gave that proposal a thumbs up.

We’re also seeing growing momentum behind proposals to use federal contracts and subsidies to discourage wide corporate pay gaps. The new Executive Excess report’s comprehensive menu of policy options spotlights these and many other innovative ideas for reining in over-the-top CEO compensation.

The country’s 20 largest low-wage employers spent nine times as much on stock buybacks as on worker retirement plan contributions over the past five years. Many of these firms boast of their “generous” matching benefits, typically a dollar-for-dollar match of 401(k) contributions up to 4 percent of salary. But matching means nothing for workers who earn so little they can’t afford to set aside anything for their “golden years.” For an interactive version of this chart and more from the latest annual Executive Excess report, click below. 

On Our Climate-Challenged Planet, Only Some Deaths Matter 

Over 3,000 migrants fleeing from poverty and conflict died last year trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea into Europe. Those deaths made barely a ripple in most of the world’s major news media.

But one tragedy on the Mediterranean this summer — a sinking that left seven dead — has been making globs of global headlines. What made this single sinking so newsworthy? The ship that sank just happened to be a luxury sailing yacht. And the casualties from that superyacht’s sinking just happened to include the high-tech CEO once hailed as the “British Bill Gates.”

Inequality.org co-editor Sam Pizzigati has more.

A Billion-User Network, No Content Moderation, What Could Go Wrong?

This week’s dour deep pocket: Pavel Durov, the founder of both the Telegram social network and his own cryptocurrency.

What has Durov sour: French officials last week charged the 39-year-old billionaire “with complicity in distributing child sexual abuse images and aiding organized crime,” among other offenses. His company’s response: “It is absurd to claim that a platform or its owner are responsible for abuse of that platform.”

Durov’s near-billion-user Telegraph network, the Guardian notes, “has defiantly refused to allow the moderation of messages.” The network’s entire staff, adds the Washington Post, hovers around just 50 people, about 0.1 percent of the staff that Facebook parent Meta devotes to safety and security.

Durov’s net worth currently sits at about $15 billion, enough to make him the richest citizen of the United Arab Emirates, the place Telegraph calls home.

The last word: “Fending off onerous speech regulations and overzealous prosecutors requires that platform builders act responsibly,” observes social network analyst Casey Newton. “Telegram never even pretended to.”

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