{"id":28258,"date":"2014-10-15T09:28:40","date_gmt":"2014-10-15T13:28:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=28258"},"modified":"2014-10-15T09:28:40","modified_gmt":"2014-10-15T13:28:40","slug":"the-pay-gap-issue-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/10\/15\/the-pay-gap-issue-again\/","title":{"rendered":"The pay gap issue, again"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s been a lot of moaning on about inequality recently &mdash; some are even predicting it will be the big issue in next year&#8217;s Canadian federal election &mdash; but the eye-popping figures being tossed around (CEOs being paid hundreds of times the average wage) are very much a case of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ncpa.org\/sub\/dpd\/index.php?Article_ID=24954\" target=\"_blank\">statistical cherry-picking<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Before retiring to their districts for the fall, the House Democratic Caucus rallied behind the CEO\/Employee Pay Fairness Act, which would prevent a public company from deducting executive compensation over $1 million unless it also gives rank-and-file employees raises that keep pace with the cost of living and labor productivity.<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, the AFL-CIO and its aligned think tanks have made hay of the huge difference between the pay of CEOs and employees. One of the most widely cited measures of the &#8220;gap&#8221; comes from the AFL-CIO&#8217;s Executive Paywatch website.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The nation&#8217;s largest federation of unions laments that &#8220;corporate CEOs have been taking a greater share of the economic pie&#8221; while wages have stagnated for the rest of us.<\/li>\n<li>As proof, it points to a 331-to-1 gap in compensation between America&#8217;s chief executives and the pay of the average worker.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>That&#8217;s a sizable number. But don&#8217;t grab the pitchforks just yet, says Mark J. Perry, economic professor at the University of Michigan-Flint and resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and Michael Saltsman, research director at the Employment Policies Institute.<\/p>\n<p>The AFL-CIO calculated a pay gap based on a very small sample &mdash; 350 CEOs from the S&#038;P 500. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 248,760 chief executives in the U.S. in 2013.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The BLS reports that the average annual salary for these chief executives is $178,400, which we can compare to the $35,239-per-year salary the AFL-CIO uses for the average American worker.<\/li>\n<li>That shrinks the executive pay gap from 331-to-1 down to a far less newsworthy number of roughly five-to-one.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s been a lot of moaning on about inequality recently &mdash; some are even predicting it will be the big issue in next year&#8217;s Canadian federal election &mdash; but the eye-popping figures being tossed around (CEOs being paid hundreds of times the average wage) are very much a case of statistical cherry-picking: Before retiring to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[831,25],"tags":[95,261,290,392],"class_list":["post-28258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-economics","tag-jobs","tag-management","tag-statistics","tag-unions"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7lM","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28258"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28258\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28259,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28258\/revisions\/28259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}