SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
livable wage
Steps Biden Should Take to Rein in Excessive CEO Pay
The president has the power to use federal contracting standards to encourage pay equity and respect for labor rights at companies like Amazon.
Jul 31, 2022
Working families are getting hammered by inflation while corporate leaders and politicians are calling for belt-tightening. But there's one group of Americans that's actually profited from increasing prices.
One pending bill would use tax incentives to encourage companies to narrow their divides -- the wider the gap between a company's CEO and worker pay, the higher their corporate tax rate.
Big company CEOs have enjoyed soaring pay, even as their employees have been struggling to keep their families safe and their bills paid.
Look at Target, for example. Last year, the median Target worker salary did not even keep pace with inflation, rising by less than 4 percent to just $25,501.
Did the giant retailer lack the money to make sure wages kept up with rising prices?
No, just the opposite. In 2021, Target spent $7.2 billion of their extra cash on stock buybacks. That would've been enough to give every one of their 450,000 employees a $16,000 raise.
When a company repurchases their own shares, it does nothing for workers. Instead, it makes rich CEOs even richer by artificially inflating the value of their stock-based pay. Last year, Target CEO Brian Cornell made $19.8 million, which is 775 times more than the median pay for his employees.
How do CEOs get away with making hundreds of times more than their workers? Corporate pay practices are still based on the ridiculous notion that the "genius" in the corner office is almost single-handedly responsible for company value.
This was always pure nonsense, but during the pandemic it became even clearer that lower-level workers are essential to their companies and our whole economy.
Target is just one example of corporate America's obscene disparities. At the Institute for Policy Studies, we looked at 300 low-wage employers and found that the average gap between CEO and worker pay rose to 670 to 1 in 2021. That was up from an already obscene 604 to 1 the year before.
And among the companies where worker pay fell below inflation, about two-thirds spent huge sums on stock buybacks to further enrich their CEOs. With such extreme unfairness, it's no wonder we're seeing record numbers of workers quitting their jobs and a surge in unionization.
One recent poll shows 87 percent of Americans view the growing gap between CEO and worker pay as a problem for the whole nation.
What can we do about it?
Workers can fight for equitable pay through collective bargaining. In other countries with higher unionization rates, CEOs tend to earn much less than their U.S. counterparts. In Canada, for example, the share of workers who are union members is about triple the rate in the United States, while average CEO pay there is less than half the U.S. level.
But policymakers need to step up as well.
On Capitol Hill, one pending bill would use tax incentives to encourage companies to narrow their divides -- the wider the gap between a company's CEO and worker pay, the higher their corporate tax rate. But companies with narrow gaps wouldn't owe an extra dime.
President Biden could also take action on his own without waiting on Congress.
For instance, he could make it hard for companies with huge pay gaps to land lucrative federal contracts. That would have a big impact, because federal contractors employ an estimated 25 percent of the private sector workforce.
Biden could also ban contractor CEOs from personally profiting from stock buybacks. And he could order contractors to be neutral in union organizing drives. That would help combat the union-busting we've seen at some major federal contractors, like Amazon.
These kinds of executive actions would build on Biden's executive order requiring federal contractors to pay a minimum of $15 an hour.
By wielding the power of the public purse against excessive CEO pay, the president could strike another blow against extreme inequality. All workers, up and down the corporate ladder, deserve a fair share of the wealth they create.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Debunking Four Myths About Inflation
Higher prices are not being driven by wage increases. They were not driven by federal assistance to people during the pandemic. And Democrats aren't to blame.
Jul 29, 2022
The truth about inflation is getting covered up by countless myths spewed by corporations and their political lackeys.
Here are the facts:
Fact #1: Inflation is not being driven by wage increases
Although wages have been rising, they've been rising more SLOWLY than prices. Hourly wages grew by 5 percent in the past year--but prices rose 8.6 percent. This means, when you adjust for inflation, workers actually got a 3.5 percent pay cut over the past year.
Fact #2: Corporate profits are one of the main drivers of inflation
Corporations are raising prices above what's needed to cover their higher costs. These mark-ups have soared. Corporations are getting away with this price gouging because they face little to no competition. And they're using the specter of inflation as a cover.
Last year, corporations raked in their highest profits in 70 years. One recent study found that over half the increase in prices we've been experiencing can be attributed to fatter corporate profits.
Fact #3: Federal assistance to people during the pandemic did not overheat the economy
Most families--who haven't had a real wage increase in years--used the assistance to pay down debt or save for the future. The assistance was barely enough to keep working families afloat.
Fact #4: Inflation is not the result of President Biden's or Democrats' policies
Republicans want to blame them for rising prices. But Democrats have tried advancing bills to bring down prices and address corporate price gouging, yet Republicans and a handful of corporate Democrats refuse to pass them.
So don't fall for the corporate myths about inflation.
Higher prices are not being driven by wage increases. They were not driven by federal assistance to people during the pandemic. And Democrats aren't to blame.
Inflation is being driven in large part by record corporate profits. The best way to fight it is to remove corporate incentives to raise prices through a windfall profits tax. And reduce monopoly power through tougher antitrust enforcement.
Know the truth.
Watch:
Keep ReadingShow Less
Truck Drivers Are Grossly Underpaid and Work Under Immoral Corporate Bosses
Truckers are underpaid, overworked, endangered and even dehumanized by bosses who install surveillance cameras, sensors, and other technology to record and report every twitch a driver makes.
Mar 30, 2022
The recent traffic-clogging protests in Canada, Washington, D.C., Europe and elsewhere by long- and short-haul truck drivers were about them being angry over having to comply with COVID-19 vaccine mandates--right?
Uh... no. That's the line being put out by right-wing extremists trying to use the legitimate gripes of truckers for their own political gain. As usual, the extremists are nuts--not the truckers.
Pay today is so abysmal that most truckers on the road have to drive dangerously long shifts of well over 60 hours a week (with many topping 100 hours) to make a bare-bones living.
My Uncle Emmitt was a coast to coast, high-balling trucker in the 1960s, and would attest that back then, trucking was an honest job with decent pay, union protections, benefits and normal hours. Then came the anti-government, deregulation craze of the 1980s, pushed by corporate profiteers and right-wing ideologues. Since then, cheap-rate trucking outfits have become predominant, unions have been cast aside, driver pay has crashed and working conditions have become punishing.
Pay today is so abysmal that most truckers on the road have to drive dangerously long shifts of well over 60 hours a week (with many topping 100 hours) to make a bare-bones living. It's a grind, too--you can't stand up for hours, you travel alone, dinner is a gas station burrito, bathroom breaks mean pulling out the plastic jug you carry along... and you won't get home for days. Exhaustion is a constant companion and a real hazard, especially because you're wrangling bulky machines known as "40 tons of death."
Yet corporate, political and media elites--oblivious to all of the above--whine that America has a trucker shortage. They might ask themselves, why? After all, there are plenty of people who are licensed truck drivers, but--get this--nine out of 10 quit within a year of getting a job! That's not because of a vaccine mandate, as right-wing political manipulators want us to believe. It's because truckers are underpaid, overworked, endangered and even dehumanized by bosses who install surveillance cameras, sensors, and other technology to record and report every twitch a driver makes.
Today's explosive truck-convoy protests are not a right-wing expression--it's a rebellion against the plutocratic system that the right wing has imposed on truckers... and on America.
"Keep On Truckin" was an iconic underground cartoon of the hippie era, created in 1968 by comic master Robert Crumb. Featuring various big-footed men strutting jauntily through life, the image became widely popular as an expression of young people's collective optimism. "You're movin' on down the line," Crumb later explained, "It's proletarian. It's populist."
But today the phrase has become ironic, for America's truck drivers themselves are no longer moving on down the line of fairness, justice and opportunity. What had been a skilled, middle-class job in the 1960s is now largely a skilled poverty-wage job, thanks to the industry's relentless push for deregulation, de-unionization and decoupling of drivers from middle-class possibilities. America's trucking system has been turned into a corporate racket, with CEOs feeling entitled to arbitrarily abuse the workers who move the corporate products across town and country. Why entitled? To enable the abuse, their lawyers have fabricated a legal dodge letting them claim that their truck drivers are not their employees, but "independent contractors."
Thus--hocus pocus!--drivers don't get decent wages, overtime pay, workers' compensation, Social Security, health care, rest breaks, reimbursement for truck expenses (including gasoline, tires, repairs and insurance) ... and as "contractors" they're not allowed to unionize. This rank corporate rip-off has become the industry standard, practiced by multibillion-dollar shipping giants like XPO, FedEx, Penske and Amazon. The National Employment Law Project recently reported that two-thirds of truckers hauling goods from U.S. ports are intentionally misclassified as contractors rather than as employees of the profiteers that hire them, direct them, set their pay levels and fire them.
Of course, corporate bosses try to hide their greed with a thin legalistic fig leaf: "We believe our (drivers') classifications are legal," sniffed an XPO executive. Sure they are, sport, because your lobbyists write the laws! But might doesn't make right, "legal" doesn't mean moral and "boss" spelled backward is double-S.O.B.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular