CEO-to-worker pay ratios

New data by the AFL-CIO Executive Paywatch, available here. Note that union members do much better than nonunion members, and certainly than minimum wage workers.

For more context read this EPI report. You must admit that the use of flawed neoclassical thinking is sometimes amusing. In this Bloomberg post, an 'expert' (aka hired gun) from a free market think tank (pro-corporations propaganda machine) says that the "AFL-CIO study [is] 'useless' because it compares two different labor markets that should be evaluated separately. While most workers could easily be replaced, he said, CEOs are 'much harder to substitute.'" Yes, they are receiving according to their productivity, and is so hard to find these geniuses.

CEO compensation

According to Shue and Townsend most of the growth in CEO compensation has been based on options. Looking at the figure below I would say stocks have also played a role.

This is all in a period in which the CEO to worker compensation ratio was already at very high levels by historical standards. And by the way, it is also very high by international standards.

And you think a $15/hour wage is too high!

Baker & Bernstein on The Incipient Inflation Freak-out

By Dean Baker and Jared Bernstein 

As predictable as August vacations, numerous economists and Federal Reserve watchers are arguing that the nation’s central bank must raise interest rates or risk an outbreak of spiraling inflation. Their campaign has heated up a bit in recent months, as one can cherry pick an indicator or two showing slightly faster growth in prices or wages. But an objective analysis of the recent data, along with longer-term wage trends, reveals that the stakes of premature tightening are unacceptably high. The vast majority of the population depends on their paychecks, not their stock portfolios. If the Fed were to slam on the breaks by raising interest rates as soon as workers started to see some long-awaited real wage gains, it would be acting to prevent most of the country from seeing improvements in living standards. To understand why continued support from the Fed is unlikely to be inflationary, consider three factors: the current state of key variables, the mechanics of inflationary pressures and the sharp rise in profits as a share of national income in recent years, along with its corollary, the fall in the compensation share.

Read rest here.

US CEO-to-Worker Compensation Ratio: A Radical Redistribution of Income

As EPI noted in this recent paper on the ratio of CEO to average worker pay, from 1978–2011, CEO compensation grew more than 876 percent, more than double the growth of the stock market and remarkably faster than the growth of annual compensation of a typical private-sector worker, up a meager 5.4 percent. The increased divergence between CEO pay and a typical worker’s pay over time is revealed in the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio, as shown in the figure. This ratio measures the gap between the compensation of CEOs in the 350 largest firms and the workers in the key industry of the firms of the particular CEOs.

See rest here.