The chief executives of America’s top 350 companies earned 312 times more than their workers on average last year, a new report published by the Economic Policy Institute reports. The rise came after the bosses of the United States’s largest companies got an average pay raise of 17.6 percent in 2017. This means they were compensated an average of $18.9 million. Meanwhile, employee wages stalled, rising just 0.3 percent over the year.
According to The Guardian, the pay gap has increased dramatically, with a few fluctuations, since the 1990s. In 1965, the ratio of CEO to worker pay was 20-to-one. That ratio increased to 58-to-one in 1989 and peaked in 2000 when CEOs earned 344 times the wage of their average worker.
In the early 2000s and during the last recession, there was a dip in CEO pay. But since 2009, it has been rising rapidly. Chief executives are even leaving the 0.1 percent in the dust, writes The Guardian. The bosses at large firms earn 5.5 times as much as the average earner in the top 0.1 percent.
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