All in all, the true cost of wage theft amounts to something substantially north of chump change: A 2014 study from the Economic Policy Institute “a nationwide epidemic that costs American workers as much as $50 billion a year.”*
Back in 1965, the Economic Policy Institute detailed last month, chief execs at America’s major corporations took home 21 times as much as America’s most typical workers. CEOs last year averaged 344 times typical worker pay.
Property crimes accounted for roughly $30 billion in economic losses in 2019; in contrast, a 2014 estimate by the Economic Policy Institute found that wage theft cost workers nearly $50 billion every year.
UAW members’ pay has decreased by 19.3% since 2008, in contrast to the 40% wage increase the “Big Three” CEOs have experienced in the same time period, according to a recent report by the Economic Policy Institute. To combat this, the UAW is demanding a 46% wage increase, a four-day work week, and overtime pay beyond 32 hours.
Although overall CEO compensation fell 14.8% in 2022 because of a stock market decline, CEO pay soared 1,209.2% from 1978 to 2022 versus typical workers’ pay, which rose 15.3% during the same period, according to an Economic Policy Institute analysis released in September. The progressive think tank makes the case that the increase in CEO pay is not harmless to the average worker and states that workers in the bottom 90% would have 25% higher wages today if not for the vast differences in wage increases from the 1970s to 2021.
Fain has also emphasized auto manufacturers’ profits as another reason the companies should be able to afford higher wages for UAW members. Although all of the big three automakers suffered losses in annual gross profit from 2019 to 2020, in the long run, the companies’ profits have shot up in the past decade while autoworkers’ wages have fallen. From 2013 to 2022, profit at Ford, Stellantis, and General Motors rose 92%, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank.
From 2008 to 2023, average hourly earnings for people working in auto manufacturing sank 19.3% and wages for workers responsible for both auto manufacturing and vehicle parts fell 10%, the EPI analysis showed.
A previous study by the Washington-based Economic Policy Institute on wage inequality published in 2022 showed that the top 10% of earners — including both men and women — are the only group to have seen their income share grow since 1979.
Workers in the bottom 10% of the income distribution saw real wages grow 9% between 2019 and 2022, a March report by the Economic Policy Institute found.
Teachers have historically faced lower pay than other workers, and the gap got even worse in 2022, a recent report indicated.
Sylvia Allegretto, a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and a research associate at the Economic Policy Institute, wrote a report that looked into how the pay of public school teachers looks compared to college graduates working elsewhere.
Back in 2012, Poilievre essentially called for ‘right-to-work’ legislation. He wanted to allow unionized employees to opt-out of paying union dues — measures that depressed not just union-sector wages but non-union wages in U.S. states that have adopted such laws, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Interesting Facts:
1. Wage Disparity: According to a report by the Economic Policy Institute, the average CEO-to-worker pay ratio in the United States was 320-to-1 in 2019. This means that CEOs made, on average, 320 times more than the typical worker’s annual pay.