Happy back-to-school season! For me, it’s eye-twitch season. Every year around this time, I nearly go blind crunching the numbers for our annual Institute for Policy Studies Executive Excess report. 

This year’s 32nd annual edition comes out tomorrow, packed with jaw-dropping data on the 100 S&P 500 firms with the lowest median wages. We’ve dubbed this rather greedy group the “Low-Wage 100.” 

A sneak preview: The CEOs of these 100 firms have over 1,280 lobbyists on their payrolls. And, guess what, these CEOs aren’t deploying that army to protect their employees against ICE attacks or the biggest cuts ever to Medicaid and SNAP. Their actual priorities? Check Inequality.org tomorrow for the vexing answer. 

In today’s newsletter, we’re highlighting numbers our friends on the AFL-CIO’s Paywatch team have been crunching. They’ve been going after overpaid CEOs as long as we have. And if you’ve never checked out their database with CEO and worker pay at more than 3,800 corporations, I highly recommend it.

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

A New Model for Selling Books and Educating Communities

This week’s frontline faces: The staff of Bol Bookstore, the first cooperatively owned bookstore in Washington, D.C.

What they’re doing to help create a more equal world: More than this store’s worker-ownership structure makes it unique. The space plays a dual role as a store and as a community space, offering up public education opportunities.

Amid rising pressures on independent booksellers from Amazon and digital readers, the cooperative model presents a new way to weather the economic difficulties of operating a bookstore.

What makes this fight so important: “The difference between a bookstore and, say, a grocery cooperative,” co-founder Arjun Shankar tells Inequality.org, “is that a bookstore cooperative is about political education — it’s an educational model.”

“A grocery cooperative has a goal of making sure people get fed,” adds Shanker. “Our goal is to make sure people know their history, know their rights, and know how people before us have struggled and resisted.” 

Photo credit: Timmy Clay

A Promising New Step To Stop Credit Card Profit Skimming

The financial giants that run the credit card industry have an ingenious way of making money: Every time a consumer taps to pay at a business, nearly 3 percent of the purchase goes straight to payment providers — think Visa and Mastercard — and banks.

These 3 percent fees added up to a whopping $198.25 billion for debit and credit in 2025. And these fees also amount to a particularly heavy drag on small businesses that already operate on slim margins.

Thankfully, a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers is working to take on this financial scheming. Their Credit Card Competition Act would, if enacted, break the Visa and Mastercard duopoly by letting merchants pick how to complete transactions. This simple fix, Carter Dougherty of Demand Progress points out, could be the first step toward stopping big banks from exorbitantly profiting off us all.

In 1980, the average major corporate CEO earned just 42 times as much as the average U.S. worker. In 2025, according to new AFL-CIO Paywatch data, S&P 500 firm CEOs pocketed 312 times as much as average workers.

To see how these S&P 500-wide figures compare with the 100 companies that pay their workers the least, stay tuned for the upcoming release of our Institute for Policy Studies Executive Excess report.

For an interactive version of this chart and more on income inequality, click the link to our Inequality.org Facts section below.

This week’s overpaid CEO: Elon Musk, the chief executive at Tesla. 

How Musk is driving inequality: To avoid a massive statistical distortion, the AFL-CIO had to remove Musk’s Tesla pay package from their annual calculation of the S&P 500’s average CEO-worker gap. Without Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, that gap stands at an already obscene 312 to 1. With Musk’s $158 billion payday, the gap rises to 5,387 to 1. 

To help us better grasp the enormity of Musk’s compensation, the labor federation offers a variety of mind-boggling comparisons. Musk’s $158 billion totals, for instance, more than the GDPs of two-thirds of the world's countries and over 41 times Tesla’s 2025 net income. 

The last word: “One CEO does not make a company successful, and workers should share in the value they help create,” the AFL-CIO’s compensation experts write in this year’s Paywatch report. Among the solutions the AFL-CIO is proposing: How about requiring all companies with pay gaps of more than 100 to 1 to negotiate a union contract with their employees?

Inequality.org, an Institute for Policy Studies nonprofit project, depends on donations to keep this newsletter free and available to all readers. Your monthly gifts make all the difference in the world, whether you can donate $3 or $300 a month. Ready to give a few bucks a month? Sign up today.