Media clips
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August 13, 2021
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According to the National Educational Association, Kentucky ranks 42nd in the nation for starting salaries, with new teachers averaging about $37,000 per year. The overall salary for educators is a little better, at nearly $54,000 per year, but teachers are still only making 78 cents for every dollar someone with similar education and experience in a different field can make, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Salaries aren’t the only point of contention for Kentucky teachers. According to the Economic Policy Institute, teachers in Kentucky on average spend more than $400 of their own money every year to provide supplies for their students and classrooms.
WHAS 11 August 12, 2021 -
The use of arbitration clauses in employment agreements has increased dramatically in the last 20 years, from only 2% of workers subject to forced arbitration in 1992 compared with 56% in 2018, according to a study from the Economic Policy Institute. The left-leaning think tank projects that this number will increase to 80% by 2024.
Bloomberg Law August 12, 2021 -
A new report issued by the Economic Policy Institute has tracked CEO pay back to 1978 and says that the average chief executive’s pay has grown 1,322% in that time period. And while that’s certainly a long span of time — more than 40 years — the average worker’s pay has grown a mere 18 percent during that same time period.
This means the average CEO makes $351 for every dollar the average worker does… and though a recent report in Forbes says wealth increased for the ultra-wealthy to the tune of $5 trillion during the pandemic, EPI points out that the CEO-to-worker pay ratio isn’t even the highest it’s ever been. That happened in 2000, when it was 366-to-1.
And even if you’re at the bottom rung of this lop-sided ladder, you’re not alone: the report says that even the top .1% of workers — those just below the chief exec category — still make about 6 and a half times less, putting CEOs, according to the report’s author Lawrence Mishel, “in their own stratosphere.”
But there’s hope. EPI says that the existing labor shortage will continue to put pressure on companies to increase wages and benefits for even their lowest paid workers and that could shift some power in the direction of the rank-and-file which is, says Mishel, “something they desperately need.”
Manufacturing.net August 12, 2021 -
An August report from progressive think tank Economic Policy Institute found that corporate boards have awarded America’s top executives compensation packages that radically outpace stock market growth and worker pay, while the nation’s federally set hourly minimum wage has remained at $7.25 for more than a decade.
The Independent August 12, 2021 -
These outsize compensation packages have grown faster than the stock market, and the pay of typical workers, college graduates, and even the top 0.1 per cent, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
“Exorbitant CEO pay is a major contributor to rising inequality that we could safely do away with,” write authors Lawrence Mishell, a distinguished fellow, and research assistant Jori Kandra.
“CEOs are getting more because of their power to set pay and because so much of their pay (more than 80 per cent) is stock-related, not because they are increasing their productivity or possess specific, high-demand skills.”
During the same period, the pay of the typical worker increased 18 per cent.
The report uses a “realised” measure of CEO pay that counts stock awards when vested and stock options when cashed in, rather than when granted.
One of the biggest jumps in executive pay was during the Covid-19 pandemic, which the authors describe as “remarkable”.
“While millions were out of work, CEOs’ realised compensation jumped 18.9 per cent in just one year.” they write.
“Typical worker compensation, of those who remained employed, did rise 3.9 per cent over that year – and even that wage growth is overstated: Perversely, high job loss among low-wage workers skewed the average wage higher.”
Historically, using the realised compensation measure, the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio was 21-to-1 in 1965, 61-to-1 in 1989, and peaked at 366-to-1 in 2000.
In 2020 the ratio was 351-to-1. The ratio was far higher than at any point in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s.
As to how the problem of massive income inequality can be solved, the EPI recommends enacting policy solutions that would reduce incentives for CEOs to extract economic concessions and limit their ability to do so.
“Such policies could include reinstating higher marginal income tax rates at the very top; setting corporate tax rates higher for firms that have higher ratios of CEO-to-worker compensation; use of antitrust enforcement and regulation to restrain firms’ – and by extension, CEOs’ – excessive market power; and allowing greater use of ‘say on pay’, which allows a firm’s shareholders to vote on top executives’ compensation.”
The Independent (via Yahoo! News) August 11, 2021 -
Meanwhile, inflation is erasing the buying power of those new raises. I talked to Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, and she says if this was a big change that’s giving workers a new kind of long-term power, wage growth would be much higher. And she worries over time, wages might simply get frozen again while prices continue rising.
NPR August 11, 2021 -
While housing costs doubled or tripled, wages didn’t. Compensation rose 17.2% since 1979, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Sacramento Bee August 11, 2021 -
“For the first time since the late 1990s, low-wage workers have a little more leverage to demand higher pay,” said David Cooper, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive Washington think tank.
AFP (via Yahoo! News) August 11, 2021 -
The chief executives at major U.S. corporations received millions of dollars in bonuses or raises last year even as many companies saw slumping sales and job cuts because of the pandemic, a new analysis shows.
CEO compensation at the top 350 companies jumped nearly 19% in 2020 to an average $24.2 million, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning think tank. By comparison, pay for rank-and-file workers last year rose roughly 4%. The typical corporate leader at big companies in 2020 made $351 for every dollar earned by a typical employee, up from a ratio of 307-to-1 in 2019, according to EPI.
Economist Lawrence Mishel, who co-authored the report, said some companies touted reductions in pay for top executives to reflect the pandemic’s impact on business, but had little impact. “CEOs offering pay cuts during the pandemic yielded favorable headlines, but were symbolic at best and a head fake at worst,” he said in a statement.
CBS August 11, 2021