What would a typical worker earn now if their wages had grown as much as the pay of CEO’s at big corporations, over the past 50 years?

$25 an hour? $100 an hour? Let’s take a look at this chart.

This first bar shows us what the salary of the typical American worker was in 1968, including benefits. Back then, they earned a little over $25 an hour, in today’s dollars. 

But what did the typical worker actually earn in 2024? Take a look. 

The typical worker’s earnings went up to $36.49 an hour. That’s good news, right? Who wants to celebrate? 

Not so fast. Back to my original question: If worker pay had climbed as much as CEO pay since the late 1960s, what would the typical worker earn today?

Ready for this?

432 dollars. Per hour. 

Of course corporations aren’t paying their workers anywhere close to that. Instead, they’re paying their CEOs 280 TIMES MORE than the typical worker. 

Why is that? Not because CEOs have become so much more valuable than their workers over the past fifty years. No, the system is rigged. 

Big corporations chronically underpay workers compared to their worker’s productivity on the job. Productivity — that is, the value of their output —   has soared and resulted in record corporate profits.

But instead of sharing these profits with their workers, corporations and their CEOs are instead siphoning them off into stock buybacks, which have also hit record levels in recent years.

Stock buybacks reduce the number of shares available for investors to purchase, which drives up the value of the remaining shares. Just simple supply and demand.

These rising share prices bump up CEO pay, because increasingly, part of their compensation is in shares of stock.

Stock buybacks used to be considered illegal stock manipulation until Ronald Reagan came along.

Shocking, I know.

CEOs can now effectively give themselves a raise, while workers get the shaft. That’s how you end up with a chart like this. 

But what can we do about it? 

We can raise the federal minimum wage, which hasn’t been increased since 2009. We can support and strengthen labor unions, which fight for better wages. We can use antitrust laws to break up big corporations that dominate their industries, raising prices for consumers and reducing job opportunities for workers. We can raise taxes on corporations whose CEOs are paid hundreds of times more than their workers. And we can ban stock buybacks. 

But first we have to realize that the reason CEOs are getting paid insane amounts of money is not because the “free market” dictates that they’re worth it. It’s because we’re letting them get away with it.