New Report Finds CEO Pay Remains Egregiously High as Corporations Move to Implement AI, Displace Workers
Worker strikes are at an all-time high. And CEOs continue to claim they can’t afford to pay workers a living wage. Yet, the annual AFL-CIO Executive Paywatch report shows the CEO-to-worker pay ratio in the United States is at its second-highest level ever.
According to the latest Executive Paywatch report, average S&P 500 Index CEO compensation was $16.7 million in 2022 — the second-highest level of executive pay in history — and data shows that over the past decade, CEO pay increased by $5 million. That’s a CEO-to-worker-pay ratio of 272-to-1. Assuming a 45-year career, S&P 500 Index company employees would need to work more than five lifetimes to make what the average CEO receives in just one year.
Read Executive Paywatch
As performers, writers and many others continue to strike, the report highlights the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in transforming our economy and its connection to CEO pay. Despite conventional wisdom that CEOs create jobs and reinvest profits to help grow the economy, the report highlights how AI is being adopted in ways that can undermine workers and increase inequality.
“The choice about how we use AI is before us right now. Will AI be used to enrich corporate CEOs and tech billionaires? Or will the productivity gains of AI be shared with working people to make our jobs easier and raise living standards?” said AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Fred Redmond during a recent press conference for the website’s release. “Performers are being asked to sign away the rights to their own likeness as a condition of employment so that the studios can add to their profits by digitally creating new content without them. Writers not writing. Actors not acting. And their fight is our fight.”
This is why unions make a difference. Unions change the power dynamics in the workplace and give working people a say in our wages, benefits and working conditions.
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