CEO-worker pay ratio shoots up to 431 : 1

Excellent find and very important news that should be seen by everyone!!

f the minimum wage had risen as fast as CEO pay since 1990, the lowest paid workers in the US would be earning $23.03 an hour today, not $5.15 an hour.

The report found that CEOs are individually profiting from the Iraq War, with huge average raises at the biggest defense contractors.

At the 34 publicly traded US corporations among the 2004 top 100 defense contractors with 10% or more of their revenues from defense contracts � companies such as United Technologies, Textron, and General Dynamics � average CEO pay increased 200% from 2001 to 2004, versus 7% for all CEOs.

It can't be much clearer than that, they're stealing the excess from taxpayers by adding excessive profits to their "patriotic" participation!!

The British "The Guardian" newspaper recently compared the earnings relationship between average worker salaries and that of CEOs in the same British companies. The survey included the 100 leading companies. On the average CEO paychecks are 66 times that of their employees. A hundred years ago J.P. Morgan recommended a gap of no more that 20x. The most extreme case of disparity was the boss of Pub Taverns, Giles Thorey, who earned 1148 times that of his average employee. They are getting less than 19 000 dollars/year.

Average pay of British CEOs in this group of companies is up 37% in 2006 to USD 5 850 000.

The Norwegian survey (Agderforskning) is not directly comparable to that of the Guardian. The average industrial worker earned USD 59 000 in 2005, while the average CEO in one of 122 companies on the main stock exchange had USD 601 000, making for a 1:11 relationship.

These figures are not adjusted for purchasing power parity. The survey is just about wages, I take it they don't consider perks like free coffee in the cafeteria or a percentage of the gross.