A weekly newsletter from the Institute for Policy Studies |
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We're back from Labor Day with some great labor news. The Biden administration's Department of Labor has just proposed to raise the salary overtime threshold, a move that will extend overtime protections to 3.6 million workers. And a new National Labor Relations Board decision restores some key pro-labor policies that will help workers gain union recognition.
Young Americans will particularly welcome these latest steps. Some 88 percent of Americans under 30, a new AFL-CIO poll has revealed, approve of labor unions and 90 percent support strikes. Says the labor federation: Gen Z may well turn out to be the most unionized generation in American history.
We need this generation today more than ever, as our just-released 29th annual Executive Excess report makes clear. This new edition, authored by our Inequality.org co-editor Sarah Anderson, has already received prime coverage in outlets ranging from the New York Times to MarketWatch.
Over the last three decades, Anderson has been crushing the myth that the “man in the corner office” is worth hundreds of times more than a corporation's rank and file employees. This year, she spotlights how major companies paying low wages are using stock buybacks to artificially inflate CEO pay.
The new Executive Excess data, Anderson told The Guardian, “reinforces the major story” now unfolding in Corporate America. “Instead of investing in their workforce or investment to be competitive in the long term, they’ve been putting out huge sums to enrich their CEOs and their shareholders.”
Much more data — and signs of hope — from Anderson's landmark report below. Bella DeVaan, for the Institute for Policy Studies' Inequality.org team |
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| INEQUALITY BY THE NUMBERS |
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Don’t Blame Retail Workers for Poor Service — Blame CEOs
Felix Allen started a union drive at a Lowe’s store in New Orleans last year after getting fed up with chronic understaffing and unfair pay practices at the home improvement chain.
“My job was to build merchandise displays. I wasn’t supposed to deal directly with customers,” Allen explains in a recent op-ed. “But when people asked me for help, I was often the only employee available. So I wound up doing everything from sawing lumber to cutting keys — all the while worrying about finishing my assigned projects.”
CEOs routinely argue that they just don’t have the money to hire more workers or pay family-supporting wages. But, as Allen points out, “their actions say something else.”
In his op-ed, Allen cites our Inequality.org team’s latest research. In 2022 alone, Lowe’s spent $14.1 billion on stock buybacks. That would’ve been enough to give every one of the company’s 301,000 U.S. employees a $46,923 bonus. Instead, Lowe’s median workers took home less than $30,000. The Lowe’s CEO? He’s sitting on company stock worth about $108 million.
Read more from Allen on how workers are fighting for respect and fair pay at some of the nation’s largest retailers. |
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Policies to Curb Runaway CEO Pay are Gaining Support
This year’s Executive Excess report mixes horrific stats on corporate inequality with hopeful signs of change. Congress and the Biden administration have introduced new taxes and corporate subsidy conditions to discourage CEO pay-inflating stock buybacks.
Also encouraging: city-level progress to raise taxes on firms with huge gaps between CEO and worker pay. One such tax in San Francisco is bringing in about $125 million per year for higher teacher salaries and other social needs. The latest Executive Excess offers the most comprehensive available menu of policy options for reining in CEO pay. Check it out at the link below.
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Which Nation Has Historically Taxed the Rich the Most?
Eight decades ago, our nation’s richest faced a 94 percent federal tax rate on their income over $200,000, about $3.5 million in today’s dollars. At that point, only one other nation, the UK, taxed its rich at a steeper rate. These stiff top tax rates — all nearly unimaginable today — would ebb only slightly in the postwar years. In the 1950s, America’s richest faced a 91 percent top tax rate. But the rich — on both sides of the Atlantic — would eventually regain their political mojo. By 1988, the UK’s highest tax rate had sunk by over half, and America’s richest faced just a 28 percent top-bracket bite. Where are taxes in the two nations heading now? Inequality.org co-editor Sam Pizzigati has more.
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PETULANT PLUTOCRAT OF THE WEEK |
I Got Mine, Pals, Stop All That Fighting to Get Yours
This week’s dour deep pocket: the 81-year-old billionaire Barry Diller, the current chair of the online home-shopping giant IAC/Interactive and the former chief at the Fox, Paramount, and Universal entertainment powerhouses.
What has him sour: the ongoing writers’ and actors’ union strikes against the entertainment industry. Diller sees “no trust between the parties” and views union concerns about the job and product-quality impact of artificial intelligence as “overhyped to death.” If the two sides don’t resolve the strike soon, says Diller, the entire industry could suffer an “absolute collapse.”
In an interview last week from his yacht near Venice, Diller called again on entertainment industry producers to bargain their own deal separate from streamers like Netflix. He had previously urged the nation’s top entertainment execs and highest-paid actors to accept a 25 percent pay cut as a “good-faith” gesture to “narrow the difference between those that get highly paid and those that don’t.”
The last word: Diller knows a thing or two about getting “highly paid.” Back in 2005, his annual pay package totaled $295 million, making him, the New York Times would report, “by far” the highest-paid executive that year among 1,400 major U.S.-based corporations. |
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This week on Inequality.org
Claude Cummings Jr., Respect, Dignity, and the Montgomery Riverfront Brawl. Amid the violence that evoked memories of the city’s ugly racist history, CWA's new union president sees progress on civil rights and economic justice.
Analilia Mejia, With Women at the Crossroads, We Must Fight the Climate Crisis to Solve Gender Inequality. As with any disaster, the rich and powerful find ways to shield themselves, leaving women, the Black and Brown, the young, the poor, and the elderly to suffer disproportionately.
Elsewhere on the Web
Amy Hanauer, How to better tax the rich men north (and south) of Richmond, The Hill. In Virginia, the home state of country singer Oliver Anthony, average families pay a larger share of their income in state and local taxes than households in Virginia’s top 1 percent.
Sonali Kolhatkar, Rich Men Versus the Rest of Us, Economy for All. The new country hit song, “Rich Men North of Richmond,” embodies the GOP’s narrative of white male resentment. But Billy Bragg helps us see the real “rich men earning north of a million” who “wanna keep the working folk down.” Ronan Farrow, Elon Musk’s Shadow Rule, New Yorker. How the U.S. government came to rely on the tech billionaire—and is now struggling to rein him in.
Paul Krugman, The Paranoid Style in American Plutocrats, New York Times. Success all too easily feeds the belief that you’re smarter than anyone else, an arrogance especially rife among tech types who made their billions defying conventional wisdom.
Danny Feingold, Striking Back: How Workers Across a Polarized U.S. Are Challenging Economic Inequality, Capital & Main. A two-year series explores how American workers across political, geographic, and racial lines are challenging an increasingly unequal economic status quo.
Michael Gast, Are we seeing an unprecedented movement of the rich towards justice? Organize the Rich. The rich, as a whole, are steadfastly defending their wealth and power, no matter the deadly repercussions. But a small, yet significant, counter force is emerging.
Iain Macauley, Rolls-Royce’s ‘Whispers’ app is now a chat room for the super rich, Automotive Daily. The app’s over 20,000 users all own a Rolls-Royce built after 2003. Full access requires a 2018 or later model. Pat Garofalo, How One Governor (May Have) Won on Corporate Handouts, Boondoggle. Pushing back against the outrageous tax subsidy schemes of big-time corporate execs turns out to make for good politics in Louisiana. Alan McDougall, Saudi Arabia’s Pro League is taking advantage of football’s greed and inequality, The Conversation. Money talks: how “sportswashing” works. |
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The 100 S&P 500 companies with the lowest wages have blown a combined total of $341 billion on stock buybacks since 2020, our Executive Excess report reveals.
Big-name retailers Lowe’s, Home Depot, Walmart, Target, and Dollar General all rank among the top 10 buyback spenders. Even the highest median wage in this group – Home Depot’s $30,100 – is significantly lower than the national average living wage. |
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Inequality.org | www.inequality.org | inequality@ips-dc.org Managing Editor: Isabella DeVaan
Co-Editors: Sarah Anderson, Chuck Collins, and Sam Pizzigati Production: Isabella DeVaan |
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