Along the same lines, the nonprofit, nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute reported a year ago that “CEO pay has skyrocketed 1,460% since 1978; CEOs were paid 399 times as much as a typical worker in 2021.”
News Herald (Ohio)
September 22, 2023
Between 1979 and 2022, the inflation-adjusted annual wages of the top 1% of workers rose by 145%, while the average annual wages of the bottom 90% rose by only 16% — about a tenth as fast, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Several factors contributed to these trends, including deregulation, the decline of unions, and little change in the federal minimum wage.
CNN
September 22, 2023
The figure Sanders cited is nearly identical to a statistic from the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., liberal think tank. The organization annually calculates the ratio of pay between CEOs and workers making the average median salary. The group’s analysis isn’t confined to autoworkers.
In the institute’s most recent report, from 2021, the compensation ratio was 399-to-1. The institute looked at the 350 largest publicly owned U.S. companies by revenue, which includes two of the Big Three automakers, General Motors Co. and Ford Motor Co. The third of the Big Three, Stellantis N.V., a Netherlands corporation formed through a 2021 merger with Fiat Chrysler, was not in this group.
Politifact
September 22, 2023
Since 2013, profits at the Big Three have risen 92 percent, according to the nonprofit Economic Policy Institute. During that time period, the companies paid out nearly $66 billion in dividends and stock buybacks, $14 billion of that in this year alone.
New Republic
September 22, 2023
There’s been an effort in much of the media to suggest that the workers are being greedy. In fact, the workers made major concessions in order to help save the Big 3 companies during the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009. Since 2008, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), real hourly earnings for autoworkers have fallen 19.3%. If the companies were still struggling, the union’s demands might seem unreasonable. But that’s not the case.
Profits for Ford, General Motors and Stellantis have jumped by 92% over the past decade, to roughly $250 billion. According to EPI, forecasts for 2023 point to more than $32 billion in additional profits.
The Cap Times
September 22, 2023
And it’s astronomical by historical standards. According to a study of the 350 largest publicly traded U.S. firms by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, the CEO-to-Worker pay ratio was just 15-1 in 1965.
Associated Press
September 22, 2023
Video of Heidi at Politico event.
Politico
September 22, 2023
According to an analysis last year by the Economic Policy Institute, the heads of the top 350 publicly traded companies earned annual incomes that were on average 399 times greater than a typical worker in 2021, up from 59-to-1 in 1989. This means that some executives’ pay is significantly greater than 399 times their employee’s pay. In fact, the heads of 22 S&P 500 companies earn at least 1,000 times more than what their typical workers take home. (See if some of these companies are also among the companies planning the biggest mass layoffs this year.)
24/7 Wall St.
September 22, 2023
Adjusting for inflation, autoworkers have seen their average wages fall 19.3% since 2008, according to Adam Hersh, senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. That’s because autoworker “concessions made following the 2008 auto industry crisis were never reinstated,” Hersh said in a recent blog post, “including a suspension of cost-of-living adjustments.”
CBS News
September 22, 2023
According to data from the Economic Policy Institute, union membership peaked in 1985, when nearly 1 in 3 U.S. workers were under a union contract compared to 2022, where only around 1 in 10 U.S. workers were part of a union.
Fox 43
September 22, 2023