Study finds extremely wide gap between CEO-worker pay

Over two thirds of the top 50 federal contractors and corporate subsidy recipients paid their CEO more than 100 times their median worker pay in 2017, the latest Executive Excess report revealed.

According to the study, the typical American believes CEO pay should run no more than six times above the average worker's pay.

But still every year billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded federal contracts and subsidies continue to flow to corporations with extremely wide pay gaps.

In 2017, 34 of the 50 largest publicly-held US firms received the most lucrative federal contracts, totalling $167bn.

Out of those 50, 33 paid their CEO’s more than 100 times the average employee and the rest had ratios larger than 25 to 1.

The Geo Group, which runs immigrant family detention centres, took in $663m in Justice Department and Homeland Security contracts in 2017. Geo CEO George Zoley pocketed $9.6m that year, 271 times more than his company's median employee pay of $35,630.

American retailer Walmart, paid half of its 2.3m employees less than $19,177 last year, even as the company’s boss made 1,188 times that amount.

According to the study, an emerging new movement is seeking to use the power of the public purse to rein in the pay of top executives and lift compensation at the bottom of the corporate income scale.

Sarah Anderson, Global Economy Project director for the institute behind the study, said: "We believe this is a good moment for policymakers to use some of this CEO-to worker pay gap to recoup some of the windfalls that went to companies through tax reform by putting tax penalties on companies with extreme gaps."