Does it surprise anyone that unions lie about the pay of corporate officials? Is it a surprise that unions that steal money from workers, force them to work by union rules not the needs of their employer would misuse statistics to create a lie?
“But as University of Michigan economist and American Enterprise Institute scholar Mark Perry explains, this pay gap is wildly exaggerated because the AFL-CIO is comparing an inflated CEO compensation number to a lowball estimate of worker pay.
For CEOs, Perry notes, the AFL-CIO uses the average total compensation for just 400 of the S&P 500 chief executives, which works out to $13.1 million each.
For the worker pay, however, it uses data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on the average hourly cash wages earned by nonsupervisory workers. For 2016, that was $21.56 an hour. The AFL-CIO multiplies this hourly wage by 52 weeks to come up with an average annual wage of $37,600.”
The bottom line is this—unions steal from workers and the public—then lie about it. Did you know your tax dollars pay for a “Labor Institute” at UCLA—financed by your tax dollars and run by the AFL-CIO—NOT educators.
Big Labor Slams CEO Pay, While Ignoring Fat Salaries For Union Bosses
Investors, 5/15/17
Income Inequality: Every year the AFL-CIO puts out a grossly misleading but widely covered report on “excessive” CEO pay. But what about top union bosses? Turns out their salaries are actually bigger than that of the average CEO.
The latest report from the AFL-CIO claims that the CEO-to-worker pay ratio in 2016 was 347 to 1. In other words, for every dollar the average worker makes, the top CEOs in the country make $347. That’s up from 123 to 1 in the mid-1990s, and 20 to 1 in the 1960s.
That’s the story anyway. And every year, the statistic gets extensively reported as an indicator of increasing income inequality in the U.S., and is used to push for limits on CEO pay or tax hikes on the rich.
But as University of Michigan economist and American Enterprise Institute scholar Mark Perry explains, this pay gap is wildly exaggerated because the AFL-CIO is comparing an inflated CEO compensation number to a lowball estimate of worker pay.
For CEOs, Perry notes, the AFL-CIO uses the average total compensation for just 400 of the S&P 500 chief executives, which works out to $13.1 million each.
For the worker pay, however, it uses data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on the average hourly cash wages earned by nonsupervisory workers. For 2016, that was $21.56 an hour. The AFL-CIO multiplies this hourly wage by 52 weeks to come up with an average annual wage of $37,600.
But the BLS data is for an average workweek of just 33.6 hours. And, this number doesn’t include the value of health and other benefits provided by employers.
So, the AFL-CIO is comparing the full compensation packages for a thin slice of the highest paid CEOs in the country — who put in 40, 50, 60 or more hours a week — to just the cash wages of a mix of full- and part-time workers.
No wonder the gap is so big.
Perry notes that if you include only those working 40-hours a week, and include their fringe benefits, the CEO-to-worker pay ratio is cut almost in half — down to 198 to 1.
Even that’s a gross exaggeration, since the AFL-CIO report only includes at a tiny sample of CEOs.
Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that there are 223,260 chief executives in the country, most of whom work for small and midsize firms. And the average wage for all CEOs in 2016 was … $194,350.
If you use that figure, the CEO-to-worker pay ratio drops all the way down to 5 to 1, which hardly seems shocking at all.
Here’s what is shocking: Labor union presidents made an average of $252,370 last year, plus another $31,000 in benefits, according to an analysis by the Center for Union Facts. The analysis looked at federal labor filings for 192 national, state and local unions.
That means union bosses make $60,000 more in wages than the average private-sector CEO. And they make 7 times as much as the average worker.
The highest-paid union president, Airline Pilots Association President Timothy Canoll, pulled down a base salary of $526,292, plus another $250,000 in benefits.
Rather than complain about how much private-sector CEOs make, union workers might want to demand that Big Labor bosses justify their own outsized pay first.
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