With Labor Day approaching, I’ve been thinking about what a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year it’s been for our country’s frontline low-wage workers. 

ICE agents have terrorized and detained employees of Walmart, Amazon, Target, and a host of other low-wage corporations. They’ve even shot at two DoorDash drivers, killing one and wounding another. 

How have CEOs responded to these threats against their employees? By looking the other away. Instead of defending their workers, they’ve used their vast political power to win more tax cuts for themselves — tax cuts paid for by slashing the public assistance programs many of their workers rely on to get by. 

In the remote economic galaxy these CEOs inhabit, fathoming the fear of not being able to feed your family — or even come home to your family after a day’s work — must be next to impossible. Our new Executive Excess report on our nation’s 100 largest low-wage corporations reveals that the average CEO-worker pay gap at these firms now stands at a stunning 614 to 1. 

Read on below for ideas on how we can narrow gaps like that as a key part of our broader, ongoing struggle to defend human rights and democracy. 

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

This week’s overpaid CEO: Brian Cornell, the former longtime Target CEO. 

How Cornell is driving inequality: As CEO, Cornell pocketed $21.8 million in 2025 compensation, 794 times as much as the company’s $27,506 median pay. With wages that low, it’s no surprise that a GAO report has found that thousands of Target employees need Medicaid and SNAP food assistance to get by. 

Target employees face challenges that go beyond poverty wages. During the ICE surge in the company's hometown of Minneapolis, agents targeted the chain and used Target parking lots for staging operations and intimidating employees. At one suburban Target, they nabbed two Latino employees — both U.S. citizens. Hours later, they dumped the men out in a parking lot in another town. 

Target officials have declined to comment on ICE harassment of their employees. Cornell transitioned from Target CEO to executive chairman last February. At the time, he held Target stock worth about $40 million. 

The last word: Community, faith, labor, and healthcare leaders recently rallied outside Target headquarters to call on the company to speak out about ongoing violations of basic rights. You can sign their petition here.

The American Federation of Teachers, meanwhile, is urging consumers to shop elsewhere for their school supplies to protest Target’s refusal to condemn ongoing unlawful ICE activity. Check out the campaign website at ShopSmart.AFT.org. 

Tackling Huge CEO-Worker Pay Gaps Should Not Be Partisan

At a time of intense political divisions, Americans across the political spectrum share enormous common ground on at least one problem facing our nation: the extreme CEO-worker pay gaps at our country’s largest corporations. What gets people particularly riled? Watching major companies hand out massive CEO paychecks while their lower-level employees are struggling to get by. 

Everyday Americans, notes one Harvard Business School study, believe that CEO-worker pay ratios should run no higher than 7 to 1. The average pay gap at the 100 large low-wage corporations we analyzed in our just-released latest annual Executive Excess report: 614 to 1. 

Policy makers can tackle this outrageous gap — at the city, state, and federal levels — through tax and government contracting policies. Moving in that direction would likely draw considerable bipartisan public support.

One survey, for instance, has found that 89 percent of Democratic and 71 percent of Republican likely voters support a tax hike on corporations that pay their CEO over 50 or more times what they pay their median employees. 

And, amazingly, U.S. senators from both sides of the aisle have actually come together to insert a provision in the pending Senate defense authorization bill that would bar stock buybacks at military contractors. CEOs of these firms, with this provision in effect, would no longer be able to artificially inflate the value of their stock-based pay through this once-illegal financial maneuver. 

For more solutions, check out the options our new Executive Excess lays out.

At the 100 lowest-wage major U.S. companies, CEO pay has soared while median worker pay has lagged behind inflation. Between 2019 and 2025, average CEO pay at these companies rose 41.4 percent in nominal — unadjusted for inflation — terms, double the 20.7 percent increase in these firms’ average median worker pay. The U.S. inflation rate over this same period: 25.9 percent.

For an interactive version of this chart and to read our full Executive Excess report, click the link below.

The Latest Indigenous Resistance to Extractivism in New Mexico

This week’s frontline face: Cheyenne Antonio, a member of the Navajo Nation and an energy organizer with Diné Citizens Against Ruining Our Environment, Diné C.A.R.E. Antonio’s family hails from Pueblo Pintado, New Mexico, about a dozen miles east of the Chaco Culture National Historical Park, a region that locals have described as a “sacrifice zone” for oil and gas extraction.

The Trump administration is now seeking to revoke federal protections that have limited new oil and gas development around the park.

What she’s doing to help create a more equal world: Antonio is working to mobilize opposition to the proposed revocation of the public land order that protects more than 336,000 acres around Chaco from new mineral leasing. She’s helped organize a community cookout and comment drive that drew hundreds of people and also helped get the federal assessment translated into Navajo.

What makes this fight so important to her: Antonio grew up immersed in the Chaco landscape, learning from elders like her grandfather, an herbalist who has gathered traditional medicinal plants for decades. But expanded drilling in the area has left places where he once gathered plants both inaccessible and unsafe.

The fight over Chaco, Antonio believes, comes down to whether future generations will still have access to the land or if the deeply unequal “sacrifice zone” pattern of oil and gas development will continue on.

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