In 2013 the average American CEO was paid 331 times what the average worker in the United States earned and 774 times what full-time minimum wage workers made, according to a new analysis released Tuesday by the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest labor union.

Chief executives took home on average a haul of about $11.7 million in 2013, while the average employee earned $35,293.

To calculate the CEOs’ earnings, the AFL-CIO relied on filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission as well as the website Salary.com, which provides compensation figures for chief executives for 3,000 firms. Data about workers’ wages were drawn from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The AFL-CIO's figures were in line with other analyses of executive pay. A survey of the CEOs of the 100 largest publicly traded companies by the firm Equilar for the New York Times found the median pay for top executives was $13.9 million in 2013 — an increase of 9 percent from the previous year.



The rising levels of executive compensation have been a well-documented phenomenon since the late 1980s, when shareholders began to offer CEOs ever more generous compensation packages, including stock options. A separate analysis done by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute shows the explosive trajectory over time: In 1968 the top CEOs were paid only about 20 times what workers earned.

Critics, including the AFL-CIO, say that such plush salaries for the nation’s CEOs are helping widen an already yawning income and wealth gap in the United States. Moreover, many find the packages particularly galling, since many of the firms with the highest-paid CEOs operate with thousands of low-wage employees.

James Skinner, CEO of McDonald’s, for instance, made a total of $27.7 million in 2013, according to the data. Michael T. Duke of Walmart Stores Inc. hauled in $20 million in 2013, and Larry Merlo of the CVS Caremark Corp. had a salary of $31 million. Those figures are dwarfed by what Larry Ellison, the CEO of software company Oracle and the best-compensated executive in the country, made last year: $78 million.

To put those numbers in perspective, a minimum wage employee would have to work 1,372 hours to make what Duke earns in a single hour in his job at the helm of Walmart.