The chief executive of General Electric raked in a $37.3 million pay package last year, a large sum by any standard.
But how much larger was it than the average pay of the 305,000 employees who helped General Electric earn billions in profits that year? The industrial giant did not disclose that comparison, and corporate America rarely reveals how the compensation of the chief executive stacks up against that of the workers in the ranks below...
...Fifty years ago, chief executives were paid roughly 20 times as much as their employees, compared with nearly 300 times in 2013, according to an analysis last year by the Economic Policy Institute.
“We have middle-class Americans who have gone years without seeing a pay raise, while C.E.O. pay is soaring,” said Senator Robert Menendez, the New Jersey Democrat who helped insert the pay ratio rule into the 2010 Dodd-Frank overhaul of financial regulation. “This simple benchmark will help investors monitor both how a company treats its average workers and whether its executive pay is reasonable.”
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