Media clips
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Top CEOs took home 276 times more than a typical worker—down from 302-to-1 in 2014 but still far higher than it’s been in previous decades. The CEO-to-worker compensation ratio was 20-to-1 in 1965, and peaked at 376-to-1 in 2000. “CEO pay has grown far faster than the pay of typical workers, college graduates, or even the top 0.1 percent,” said Schieder. “Skyrocketing CEO pay isn’t about the market for talent—it’s about what executives can get away with.” From 1978 to 2015, inflation-adjusted compensation of top CEOs increased 940.9 percent, a rise 75 percent greater than stock market growth and substantially greater than the painfully slow 10.3 percent growth in a typical worker’s annual compensation over the same period.
The Nation July 15, 2016 -
Donald Trump says the US is getting killed when it comes to trade deals, and that he would negotiate better ones. Would better trade deals really help the US? Director of trade for the Economic Policy Institute, Robert Scott, joins “News with Ed” and says that we shouldn’t have trade deals at all because of the “corrupt process” involved in negotiating them.
RT July 14, 2016 -
Moreover, the raise is puny — $1.85 an hour, spread out over three whole years, meaning inflation will eat some of it up. “That’s a roughly 3.2 percent annual boost after taking projected future inflation into account,” noted Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute, a left-of-center think tank. “This hardly seems to deserve a parade.”
New York Magazine July 14, 2016 -
Not by a long way. Globally, women are only paid 52% of what men are paid, according to the World Economic Forum. The organization has only been tracking the gender gap for 10 years, but the Economic Policy Institute compared pay in the United States in 1979 and now. Back then, American women earned about two-thirds of when men did. Now, it’s a little over 80%.
CNN July 14, 2016 -
We asked two trade experts for their views. Bryan Riley is a senior policy analyst in trade policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. Robert E. Scott is a senior economist and director of trade and manufacturing policy research at the liberal Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C. Scott said American workers have suffered because of the unfavorable balance of trade the U.S. has with China and other industrialized countries. “It is certainly true that the growing trade deficit has cost the U.S. millions of jobs, including the majority of the 5.3 million manufacturing jobs that we’ve lost since 1997-98,” he said.
The Plain Dealer July 14, 2016 -
Your boss has a lot more zeroes at the end of his paycheck than you do. In 2015, chief executives in America’s largest companies made an average of $15.5 million in compensation per year, which is 276 times the annual average pay of the typical worker, according to data released Tuesday by the Washington, D.C.-based think tank Economic Policy Institute. And that already-large number was even higher in 2014, when the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio was 302-to-1.
MarketWatch July 14, 2016 -
Average CEO pay for the top 350 biggest firms was $15.5 million in 2015, according to a new report released by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. That represents a 276 to 1 pay ratio to the typical worker. What’s shocking is that’s down from last year. In 2014, the CEO-to-worker compensation ratio was 302 and the average pay was $16.3 million. Average CEO pay for the top 350 biggest firms was $15.5 million in 2015. That represents a 276 to 1 pay ratio to the typical worker. Economist Lawrence Mishel, who led the study, was initially surprised. “CEO compensation is something that usually doesn’t go down unless there’s a big tech bubble burst [like] in 2000 [or a] financial crisis,” he said.
PBS News Hour July 14, 2016 -
CEOs on average made $15.5 million last year, which is 276 times more than a typical worker did, according to a study released Tuesday
These figures actually show a smaller gap than the previous year. In 2014, that ratio was 302-to-1, with CEOs earning $16.3 million.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean companies have fundamentally changed how they pay their CEOs, according to the Economic Policy Institute study, a nonprofit think tank that researches economic trends. The lower ratio had to do with a volatile market instead of a fundamental change within companies, so “CEO pay can be expected to resume its sharp upward trajectory when the stock market resumes rising,” the report reads.
NPR Marketplace July 13, 2016 -
Black pay, white pay: These racial disparities show up in pay, of course, as the work of economist Valerie Wilson has shown (Wilson’s work is a national treasure trove of information on racial economic disparities). In this paper, Wilson shows that in periods where labor markets really tightened up, this pumped-up reaction function I just noted is highly operative: “in all periods when median household income for African Americans increased more than that for whites (1982-1990, 1991-2001, and 1995-2000), African American households also experienced a greater increase in hours worked than did white households, especially if the households had lower incomes.” To be clear, neither racial wage nor income gaps closed, but the longer we stay at full employment, the more pressure there is on those gaps.
The Washington Post July 13, 2016 -
To think through smart protectionism, consider the controversial history of NAFTA. Sanders and Trump have blasted the trade agreement for, as Jeff Faux, the founding president of the Economic Policy Institute, put it, opening “the door through which American workers were shoved, unprepared, into a brutal global competition for jobs that has cut their living standards and is destroying their future.”
The Atlantic July 13, 2016