Labor Day is Monday, September 4. Folk singer David Rovics just released his adaptation of Oliver Anthony’s viral hit “Rich Men North of Richmond.”
SARAH ANDERSON, sarah@ips-dc.org, @inequalityorg
OLIVIA ALPERSTEIN, olivia@ips-dc.org
Anderson directs the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies and co-edits the IPS website Inequality.org. Alperstein is deputy communications director at IPS.
Anderson is author of the just released report “Executive Excess 2023” which finds “the ‘Low-Wage 100’ large corporations have spent more than $340 billion on stock buybacks since 2020.”
Key findings:
1. The CEO-worker pay gap at the Low-Wage 100 averaged 603 to 1 in 2022
- Chief executives in this group raked in $15.3 million on average in 2022, while median worker pay averaged just $31,672.
- Live Nation Entertainment had the fattest CEO paycheck and the widest pay gap. Michael Rapino hauled in $139 million, 5,414 times as much as his firm’s median of $25,673.
2. The Low-Wage 100 have spent more than $340 billion on stock buybacks since 2020
- Between January 1, 2020 and May 31, 2023, 90 of the Low-Wage 100 reported combined stock buyback expenditures of $341.2 billion. This maneuver artificially inflates executive stock-based pay and siphons funds from worker wages and other productive investments.
- Lowe’s led the buybacks list, spending $34.9 billion on share repurchases over the past three and a half years. In 2022 alone, Lowe’s spent more than $14.1 billion on buybacks — enough to give every one of its 301,000 U.S. employees a $46,923 bonus.
- Home Depot came in second, with $28.9 billion in stock buybacks since January 2020, and Walmart ranks third, with $23.9 billion.
3. During their stock buyback spree, Low-Wage 100 CEOs’ personal stock holdings increased more than three times as fast as their firms’ median worker pay
- The CEOs of the 90 low-wage S&P 500 companies that have spent funds on buybacks since 2020 have amassed approximately $14.9 billion worth of their company stock.
- At the 65 buyback companies where the same person held the top job between 2019 and 2022, the CEOs’ personal stock holdings soared 33 percent to an average of $184.7 million. Median pay at these firms rose only 10 percent to an average of $31,972. (not adjusted for inflation)
- FedEx CEO Frederick Smith has the largest stockpile in the Low-Wage 100. His personal holdings have grown 65 percent to more than $5 billion since January 2000. By contrast, FedEx median worker pay fell by 20 percent to $39,177 (including $9,267 in health benefits) between 2019 and 2022.
4. Over half of the Low-Wage 100 receive taxpayer-funded federal contracts
- Of the 100 companies in our sample, 51 received federal contracts worth a combined $24.1 billion during fiscal years 2020-2023. These low-wage federal contractors spent nearly $160 billion on stock buybacks over the course of these years.
- Amazon is the largest contractor in the Low-Wage 100, with at least $10.4 billion in federal deals in the past few years, mostly from a National Security Agency web services contract.
See full summary and report.