Pay Gap Expands As CEOs Given 500 Times MORE Than Workers

A new report has found that CEO pay is once again skyrocketing, while companies are slashing the median pay of workers. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

A new report's found that CEO pay is once again skyrocketing while companies are slashing the median pay for the people who are getting the job done. The workers. I love this fact that Bernie Sanders seemed to be the only person that had enough sense to say, wait a second. There needs to be some cost for a CEO getting five or 600 times the amount of money that the worker's getting. The worker is the person that's making the CEO look good. The worker is delivering and the CEO is getting paid 500 times what the worker's being paid. Pick it up.

Yeah. This new study found that over the last year, just the last year, CEO pay has gone up 11%, worker pay has declined by 9%. So there is now an even, a 20 point larger gap than there was before. So CEOs, not only are the companies making more money than ever, they have fully recovered from the pandemic numbers, but workers are making less on average,

This number says 251 times, 250, now this is the median number.

Yeah.

Understand that's the median number. That's not with the typical CEO getting paid 500 times, but the median number, just the median number alone is 250 times. And so how do you solve it? What's the solution there? And the solution is to say, okay, if we've got a company, and this is Bernie's solution, it's at least the beginning, if a CEO is making 50 times what a worker is making, there's gotta be some tax. Now, the problem I have with that is that doesn't really help the worker. You follow me. The tax, that's where this all goes astray. The government collecting tax money still doesn't help that worker. There's got to be something more direct where the government's not making that money, but the worker is benefiting. And to say, well, we know this, some people have already tried it. You've got places where they've already tried this. It doesn't do anything for the worker. All it does is makes more tax money for that entity. Right?

Right. The cities that have done this, or the states that have done this, say, hey, well look, we are bringing in more revenue. And the workers at these companies say, well, okay, wonderful for you. What about me? Like, you said you were gonna help me and I have nothing. My life has not changed. And a lot of times also, these corporations, if they do get hit with a tax like this.

They pass it on.

Right. They'll look for loopholes too. And they'll say, okay, well you're talking about salary. So your base salary is gonna be a million dollars. Your bonus at the end of the year is gonna be 50 million and you can't touch that because that's not part of your regular pay. So they will find a way around it if that happens. But what has to happen here is that we have to get price gouging under control to help the consumers and we have to put some kind of protection in place for these workers to make sure that when the company does better, they're doing better as well.

I thought this was so San Francisco. San Francisco, they tried doing some variation of this. Well, San Francisco made $137 million in tax money for the city, but the workers didn't benefit one dime. So as we look at this, you gotta say, okay, well what is really gonna protect the workers? What kind of mandate are we gonna give the CEO to say, look, no, 500 times what the worker's making doesn't make any sense? And it's gotta be something besides a tax. Bernie at least is onto something here. It's let's do something. But it's gotta be something not that the government makes money, but the worker actually benefits.