2011 PayWatch: Average CEO Salary–$11.4 Million
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While 25 million unemployed and underemployed U.S. workers are drowning, CEO pay skyrocketed by 23 percent, for an average salary of $11.4 million in 2010, according to the AFL-CIO Executive PayWatch. Released today, data compiled at PayWatch also show CEOs have done little to create badly-needed jobs, instead sitting on a record $1.93 trillion in cash on their balance sheets.
The 2011 Executive PayWatch features the compensation of 299 S&P 500 company CEOs and provides direct comparisons between those CEOs and the median pay of nurses, teachers, firefighters and others. For instance, while a secretary makes a median annual salary of $29,980, someone like Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf rakes in $18,973,722 million—632 times the secretary’s salary. The pay gap between Wall Street and Main Street has widened egregiously—as recently as 1980, CEOs made 42 times that of blue-collar workers.
(Check out the 2011 Executive PayWatch to read case studies of six CEOs and find out how many firefighters it takes to make the salary of one CEO. You also can compare salaries of nurses, secretaries and others with CEOs and share the results with your friends on Facebook. Click here to share on Facebook.)
Maybe CEOs can’t focus on job creation because they have more pressing issues—like lobbying to repeal key provisions of a financial disclosure reform bill Congress passed last year. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act requires corporations to reveal the CEO-to-worker pay gap—and the Wall Street rulers don’t want to do that. (Click here to urge your member of Congress not to weaken Wall Street reform in any way.)
Snow? Oh, No. It’s Still the Economy
Here are a few tidbits worth noting from around the nation’s economic scene.
Bob Herbert at the New York Times puts the sorry U.S. unemployment rate in clearer–and more painful–perspective today, pointing out how the workers losing jobs are those who had almost no income to begin with.
The highest group, with household incomes of $150,000 or more, had an unemployment rate during that quarter of 3.2 percent. The next highest, with incomes of $100,000 to 149,999, had an unemployment rate of 4 percent.
Contrast those figures with the unemployment rate of the lowest group, which had annual household incomes of $12,499 or less. The unemployment rate of that group during the fourth quarter of last year was a staggering 30.8 percent. That’s more than five points higher than the overall jobless rate at the height of the Depression.
Big Bankers Howl—and Other Tidbits
Finally, some good news on the jobs front. The Council of Economic Advisers announced that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has now created or saved between 1.5 million and 2 million jobs. The economic recovery package also added several percentage points to the growth of the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP). Other tidbits:
• President Obama yesterday announced his intention to propose a Financial Crisis Responsibility Fee that would require the largest and most highly levered Wall Street firms to pay back taxpayers for the extraordinary assistance provided so that the TARP program does not add to the deficit. Even before the announcement, Big Bankers were squealing like stuck pigs. From Think Progress:
Edward Yingling, president and chief executive, American Bankers Association: “To impose yet another burden on the industry would obviously decrease their ability to lend.”
