As ordinary workers across the United States watched inflation eat away at modest wage gains in 2021, many corporations — including firms contracting with the federal government — used record-shattering profits to lavish their CEOs with bigger pay packages and reward shareholders with billions of dollars in stock buybacks.
According to an analysis published on June 7, by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), the average gap between CEO and median worker pay at a sample of 300 low-wage U.S. corporations surged in 2021, rising to 670 to 1 — up from 604 to 1 in 2020.
Forty-nine of the publicly traded companies examined in the IPS study, titled “Executive Excess,” had CEO-to-worker-pay ratios above 1,000 to 1 last year. Amazon, for instance, paid CEO Andy Jassy a staggering 6,474 times more than it paid its median worker in 2021, a year in which the e-commerce giant spent $4.3 million on anti-union consultants.