Making 1,000x Your Average Worker Should Be Cause for Shame, Not Pride

A few weeks ago, the folks at the site NerdWallet decided to analyze just how stark the inequality at major fast food and retail chains is. They calculated the ratio of CEO hourly compensation to the average hourly worker wage as well the number of months of overtime that average worker would have to work in order to earn money equivalent to that hourly CEO pay. Their results are below:

The CEOs at McDonald's, Starbucks, and Dollar General make over 1,000 times as much per hour as the average non-executive employee in their company. Their employees would have to work over three months just to make as much as those CEOs make in one hour.

According to data from the Social Security Administration, the median wage in 2012 was $27,519.10. If we assume 40 hours a week and 52 weeks per year, then that comes out to $13.23 per hour. The CEO at McDonald's makes 699 times that per hour.

The CEO with the lowest hourly compensation in NerdWallet's sample was that of Best Buy, at $6,517 per hour. That CEO makes 666 times the average non-executive Best Buy employee and 493 times the median worker in the country.

According to a 2010 report from the Institute for Policy Studies, CEOs back in the 70s rarely made more than 30 times what their workers made. IPS calculated that the CEOS major corporations recently averaged 263 times the compensation of average workers. Unsurprisingly, the rapid growth of executive compensation began in the 1980s---and it's continued since.

Read the rest here.