May, 17 2016, 02:45pm EDT
CEOs Paid 335 Times Average Rank-and-File Worker; Outsourcing Results in Even Higher Inequality
2016 Executive PayWatch highlights Mondelez International’s Pay Inequality
WASHINGTON
CEO pay for major U.S. companies continues to soar as income inequality and outsourcing of good-paying American jobs increases. Outsourcing has become a hot presidential election topic with candidates calling out corporations who say they need to save money by sending jobs overseas. Meanwhile, according to the new AFL-CIO Executive PayWatch, the average CEO of an S&P 500 company made $12.4 million per year in 2015 - 335 times more money than the average rank-and-file worker.
The Executive PayWatch website, the most comprehensive searchable online database tracking CEO pay, showed that in 2015, the average production and nonsupervisory worker earned approximately $36,900 per year, a wage that when adjusted for inflation, has remained stagnant for 50 years.
"The income inequality that exists in this country is a disgrace. We must stop Wall Street CEOs from continuing to profit on the backs of working people," said AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. "Last month when I stood with the Carrier workers in Indianapolis whose jobs making home heating furnaces are being shipped to northern Mexico, I saw first-hand how corporate greed destroys communities. Carrier is a subsidiary of United Technologies and its CEO Gregory Hayes made nearly $10.8 million in 2015. It's shameful that a CEO can make that type of money and still destroy the livelihood of the hard-working people who make the company profitable."
Mondelez International, highlighted in this year's PayWatch, represents one of the most egregious examples of CEO-to-worker pay inequality. The company, which makes Nabisco products including Oreos, Chips Ahoy and Ritz Crackers, announced earlier this year that in order to reduce costs, it is sending 600 family-sustaining jobs from Illinois to Mexico, where workers face poor labor and safety standards. Mondelez CEO Irene Rosenfeld made $19.7 million in 2015 - that's $9,471.15 per hour.
"It seems that hard work doesn't matter anymore. This is the corporate attitude," said Mary Willis, who was among hundreds of Nabisco workers from the South Side of Chicago laid off in March. "They quit me. I didn't quit them. It used to be that places like Nabisco were proud places to work, but now workers like me are tossed to the curb despite years of dedication."
While the trend of companies putting profits over people is rampant, working people are fighting back. The AFL-CIO has endorsed the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers' International Union (BCTGM) boycott of Nabisco products made in Mexico.
Working families also are joining striking Verizon workers on the picket lines fighting for a fair contract. Verizon wants to ship more good jobs overseas, outsource work to low-wage contractors and transfer workers away from their families for months at a time, provoking the strike by 39,000 working men and women who help make it so profitable. Over the past three years, Verizon has made a record $39 billion in profits. In 2015, CEO Lowell McAdam made $18.3 million - 498 times the average pay of a rank and file worker.
More information about United Technologies, Mondelez and Verizon's massive CEO-to-worker pay disparity and inequality among S&P 500 companies can be found at www.paywatch.org.
The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) works tirelessly to improve the lives of working people. We are the democratic, voluntary federation of 56 national and international labor unions that represent 12.5 million working men and women.
LATEST NEWS
Biden's Decision to Skip Climate Ambition Summit Called a 'Disgrace'
The U.S. president's no-show is "a betrayal to those who have rallied for him and a missed opportunity for him to deliver on his climate commitments," said 350.org's North American director.
Sep 19, 2023
U.S. President Joe Biden is drawing anger from environmental groups for opting not to attend this week's Climate Ambition Summit convened by United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, a gathering billed as an effort to rally countries around plans to urgently phase out planet-warming fossil fuels as the window for action closes.
Biden's climate envoy, John Kerry, is set to attend the Wednesday summit as the U.S. representative, and he is not expected to speak.
"President Biden's decision not to attend is a betrayal to those who have rallied for him and a missed opportunity for him to deliver on his climate commitments," Jeff Ordower, the North American director of 350.org, said in a statement Tuesday.
"It is a disgrace that President Biden is skipping the Climate Ambition Summit," Ordower continued. "The president is dodging accountability to U.N. Secretary-General Guterres by refusing to halt new fossil fuel projects and rejecting Guterres' invitation to be a climate leader and back up his words with substantive action. Biden's inaction reveals how he shamelessly continues to sacrifice some of the most impacted Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities in service to an energy strategy that continues to privilege oil barons over those on the frontlines."
The event will take place on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in New York City just days after more than 75,000 people took to the streets there to demand aggressive climate action from the U.S., the largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases and the world's biggest contributor to planned fossil fuel expansion.
"Showing up would mean exposing his inadequate climate policies and relentless support for fossil fuels on the global stage."
According to a report released last week by Oil Change International (OCI), planned oil and gas extraction in the U.S. accounts for more than a third of prospective fossil fuel expansion worldwide through 2050. OCI dubbed the U.S. "planet-wrecker-in-chief."
Allie Rosenbluth, U.S. program manager at OCI, said it's "no wonder" that Biden has opted to no-show the Climate Ambition Summit, "since showing up would mean exposing his inadequate climate policies and relentless support for fossil fuels on the global stage."
"Biden should be worried about this climate hypocrisy," said Rosenbluth.
In the lead-up to Wednesday's summit, Guterres has expressed hope that the event will help spur a "quantum leap" in the emissions reduction pledges of rich nations, which are disproportionately responsible for greenhouse gas pollution that is fueling increasingly extreme and deadly weather disasters across the planet.
But while Guterres has reportedly received requests from more than 100 countries to speak at the summit, the leaders of some of the world's major polluters—including the U.S., China, and the United Kingdom—aren't expected to attend.
"That is a worrying political signal about the seriousness with which countries are taking the goals of the summit," Rachel Cleetus, policy director of the Union of Concerned Scientists, wrote Monday. "Shame on world leaders if a year like this one—filled with tremendous suffering and exorbitant costs from human-caused climate change, and on track to be one of the hottest on record—is not enough to make them rise to the occasion."
Keep ReadingShow Less
114 Climate Defenders Arrested While Blocking Entry to NY Federal Reserve
The activist group Climate Defiance asked: "Why are we getting handcuffed while people who literally torch the planet get celebrated for their 'civility' and their 'moderation'?"
Sep 18, 2023
A day after tens of thousands of climate activists marched through Manhattan's Upper East Side demanding an end to oil, gas, and coal production, thousands more demonstrators hit the streets of Lower Manhattan Monday, where more than 100 people were arrested while surrounding the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to protest fossil fuel financing.
Protesters chanted slogans like "No oil, no gas, fossil fuels can kiss my ass" and "We need clean air, not another billionaire" as they marched from Zuccotti Park—ground zero of the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement—to pre-selected sites in the Financial District. Witnesses said many of the activists attempted to reach the New York Stock Exchange but were blocked by police.
"We're here to wake up the regulators who are asleep at the wheel as they continue to let Wall Street lead us into ANOTHER financial crash with their fossil fuel financing," the Stop the Money Pipeline coalition explained on social media.
Local and national media reported New York Police Department (NYPD) officers arrested 114 protesters and charged them with civil disobedience Monday after they blocked entrances to the Fed building. Most of those arrested were expected to be booked and released.
"I'm being arrested for exercising my First Amendment right to protest because Joe Manchin is putting a 300-mile-long pipeline through my home state of West Virginia and President [Joe] Biden allowed him to do it for nothing in return," explained Climate Defiance organizer Rylee Haught on social media, referring to the right-wing Democratic senator and the Mountain Valley Pipeline.
As she was led away by an NYPD officer, a tearful Haught said Biden "sold us out."
"He promised to end drilling on federal lands, and he's selling out Appalachia's future for profit," she added.
Responding to the "block-long" line of arrestees, Climate Defiance asked: "Why are we getting handcuffed while people who literally torch the planet get celebrated for their 'civility' and their 'moderation'?"
Alicé Nascimento of New York Communities for Change toldWABC that the protests—which are part of Climate Week and are timed to coincide with this week's United Nations Climate Ambition Summit—are "our last resort."
"We're bringing the crisis to their doorstep and this is what it looks like," said Nascimento.
As they have at similar demonstrations, protesters called on Biden to stop approving new fossil fuel projects and declare a climate emergency. Some had a message for the president and his administration.
"We hold the power of the people, the power you need to win this election," 17-year-old Brooklynite Emma Buretta of the youth-led protest group Fridays for Future told WABC. "If you want to win in 2024, if you do not want the blood of my generation to be on your hands, end fossil fuels."
Keep ReadingShow Less
House GOP Slammed Over Shutdown Prevention Plan That Is 'Doomed to Fail'
"The proposed continuing resolution backed by Speaker McCarthy is trying to force a path to deep cuts that were rejected in the debt ceiling deal he agreed to with President Biden earlier this year," said one expert.
Sep 18, 2023
Two weeks out from a U.S. government shutdown, some House Republicans on Sunday evening reached a potential deal—one which Democrats on Capitol Hill and other critics across the country warn is a dangerous proposal that is "doomed to fail."
The GOP's continuing resolution (CR) would avert a government shutdown on October 1, but the 30-day stopgap funding bill also lacks military assistance for Ukraine and requested U.S. disaster relief, would impose an 8% cut for nondefense spending, and includes immigration riders opposed by congressional Democrats and President Joe Biden.
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) "was well aware" that the CR wouldn't pass the Democrat-controlled upper chamber "but was hoping House passage would be a show of strength that would force a response from the Senate and potentially shift responsibility for a shutdown across the Rotunda," noted The New York Times.
However, Politicoreported Monday, "as details of the deal hashed out by leaders of the Main Street Caucus and House Freedom Caucus trickled out, a bevy of conservative hardliners piped up with various versions of 'Hell No'." At least a dozen far-right House members have voiced their opposition, with some suggesting they won't support any CR.
Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) wrote on social media Monday that "we cannot allow Kevin McCarthy and his radical posse to throw yet another tantrum at the expense of poor and working Americans. Period."
The 87-member ProsperUS coalition said in a statement Monday that "these last-ditch efforts to slash critical investments in workers and families are deeply unpopular and doomed to fail. Extreme House GOP members should accept reality: The majority of Congress is with the American people in rejecting hostage-taking and painful and irresponsible cuts."
The coalition also noted that the proposed CR betrays the Fiscal Responsibility Act, the bipartisan debt ceiling deal Biden and McCarthy negotiated earlier this year, as House Republicans nearly forced an economically catastrophic U.S. default.
"The House majority should set aside this latest failed proposal and allow the full House to vote on government funding bills at or above the floor set in the bipartisan debt limit deal," ProsperUS argued. "Anything less would be a clear step backward for our economy and hurt the most vulnerable communities we represent."
In a series of posts on X, formerly Twitter, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities president Sharon Parrott similarly stressed that "the proposed continuing resolution backed by Speaker McCarthy is trying to force a path to deep cuts that were rejected in the debt ceiling deal he agreed to with President Biden earlier this year."
The GOP proposal would slash funding for federal programs—including on childcare, education, environmental protection, food assistance, medical research, and transportation—for 30 days, but that could be dragged out much longer. As Parrott explained, "The nondefense cuts will create some near-term challenges, but more importantly, once a CR is in place, it is likely to be extended until final appropriations bills are complete—which is sure to take more than a month."
"Congress needs to pass a CR that allows the government to continue operations until funding bills are done, addresses near-term needs that cannot wait for final appropriations bills, and doesn't try to renegotiate the debt ceiling agreement," she asserted. "The public deserves a government that stays open to deliver services people count on and policymakers who negotiate agreements in good faith and govern by a theory other than brinkmanship."
In an apparent reference to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) blocking a "minibus" packaging three spending bills, Parrott also said that "last week's hiccup notwithstanding, the Senate has demonstrated that reasonable funding bills crafted under the basic framework of the debt ceiling agreement can garner broad bipartisan support."
Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.) on Monday moved to suspend a rule invoked by Johnson—which will require 67 votes later this week.
"This is an effort to move forward on the minibus, and keep the appropriations process on track here in the Senate," said Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Monday. "It's unfortunate that one member—who does not represent the views of most senators—prevented us from moving forward last week."
"But I believe a majority of senators want to keep moving forward. Our Republican colleagues have asked for regular order and we have worked with them to let that happen," he added, thanking not only Murray but also Susan Collins (R-Maine), the top Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee, who last week called out Johnson.
Schumer also took aim at Republicans in the lower chamber for "what they called a deal for a CR but in reality reads like a hard-right screed," declaring that the proposal "can be boiled down to two words: slapdash, reckless. Slapdash because it is not a serious proposal for avoiding a shutdown, and reckless because if passed it would cause immense harm to so many priorities that help the American people."
"To his credit, the speaker knows a shutdown would be a terrible outcome. When I spoke with him in late July, we had a very encouraging conversation about the need for bipartisanship to avoid a shutdown. We both recognized that a bipartisan CR would be the way forward," Schumer added. "Two months later, a bipartisan CR is still the only answer for avoiding a government shutdown. I urge Speaker McCarthy, as well as reasonable House Republicans, to resist the 30 or so extremists within their ranks who seem dead-set on provoking a crisis."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular
Independent, nonprofit journalism needs your help.
Please Pitch In
Today!
Today!