U.S. CEO's pay 231 times higher than that of average workers

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http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-mo-us-ceo-pay-231-times-more-than-average-workers-20120502,0,7433906.story

So much for the new austerity.

The average U.S. chief executive earned more than $11 million last year in salary, stock options and other compensation, according to a new analysis by the Economic Policy Institute. That’s about 231 times more, on average, than workers.

That ratio has shrunk a bit since the height of the dot.com bubble, when a ballooning stock market inflated CEO compensation to 411 times that of working stiffs.

And it’s smaller than the pay gap calculated recently by the AFL-CIO, the umbrella federation of unions representing about 12 million U.S. workers. Their analysis concluded that the typical CEO of an S&P 500 Index company made 380 times the average wages of U.S. workers in 2011.

Whatever. What's clear is that the pay gap between U.S. CEOs and rank-and-file workers is higher than anywhere else in the developed world. And it has been accelerating over the last few decades. In 1965, the U.S. CEO-to-worker compensation ratio was roughly 20 to 1.

[On the Road]

1. It Used to be a Trusim

that no one gets rich working for someone else. That hasn't been true for a while now.