The Compensation of CEOs of Large American Companies grew by 11% in 2021 and, on average, is already 399 times higher than that of a common employee in these industries, according to a report published Tuesday by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) think tank.
This progressive institution analyzed the income of the top managers of the 350 largest companies in the country, who earned on average last year $27.8 millionplus their salaries and other compensation.
That figure is 399 times what a typical employee earns, a new all-time high, despite the fact that, in order not to distort reality, the study excluded the earnings of Tesla CEO Elon Musk, which amounted to about 23.5 billion dollars. thanks to the execution of options on shares of the company.
The report describes how the pay gap between top managers and their employees has grown in recent decades, as In 1989, CEOs earned an average of 59 times more than the typical worker.
According to Josh Bivens, the EPI’s research director and one of the report’s authors, the “exorbitant” compensation that CEOs receive is a major contribution to rising inequality and one that could be curbed without harming society as a whole. economy.
“We need to put in place policy solutions that reduce CEOs’ incentives to extract economic concessions and limit their ability to do so,” he said in a statement.
Among the options that the EPI puts on the table are that of raising income tax rates in the highest brackets, use antitrust laws to reduce the excessive market power of some firms and generalize the rules that allow a company’s shareholders to vote on the compensation received by its executives.
In recent years, some initiatives have been launched in the US to respond to this growing inequality; For example, the stock market regulator requires listed companies to report the compensation range of their CEOs relative to that of the average worker in their firm.
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