Dur­ing the most recent fis­cal year, the 30 com­pa­nies that make up the Dow Jones Indus­tri­al Aver­age gave $378.5 bil­lion to share­hold­ers. That trans­lates to more than $46,000 for each of their com­bined 8 mil­lion employees.

If you work for any of these companies, management is choosing to pay you far less than they could.

Pub­licly trad­ed com­pa­nies — like Nike, Coca-Cola and Apple — have many options for how to spend their prof­its. His­tor­i­cal­ly, com­pa­nies spent their prof­its rein­vest­ing in their busi­ness through research and devel­op­ment, merg­ers and acqui­si­tions, cap­i­tal expen­di­tures, and work­force train­ing and increased salaries. Today, cor­po­ra­tions are spend­ing the major­i­ty of their prof­its on share repur­chas­es and div­i­dends, which enrich exec­u­tives and share­hold­ers while stiff­ing workers.

When com­pa­nies repur­chase shares, the stock price often goes up, which investors like, and which pri­or to SEC rule changes in 1982 was viewed as ille­gal price manip­u­la­tion. In addi­tion, earn­ings per share increase, a met­ric that is often used to deter­mine exec­u­tive bonus­es. The rise in the stock price at the time share buy­back pro­grams are announced allows exec­u­tives to sell their shares and prof­it from their own actions. Research con­duct­ed by Secu­ri­ties and Exchange Com­mis­sion­er Robert J. Jack­son, Jr. found alarm­ing evi­dence of cor­po­rate exec­u­tives using share repur­chas­es to sell their own stock, putting more com­pa­ny mon­ey into their own pockets.

In 1982, the Secu­ri­ties and Exchange Com­mis­sion issued a rule that sets con­di­tions under which pub­licly-trad­ed com­pa­nies can repur­chase shares with­out being in vio­la­tion of anti-fraud pro­vi­sions. Since then, share repur­chas­es have steadi­ly risen, from aver­ag­ing 4 per­cent of cor­po­rate net income in 1983, to 27 per­cent by 1986, and 50 per­cent from 2007 to 2016. Com­bined with div­i­dends, cor­po­ra­tions spent 92 per­cent of net prof­its on share­hold­er pay­ments between 2007 and 2016.

Mean­while, real aver­age hourly wages in 2018 are the same as they were in 1978.

If you work for any of these com­pa­nies, man­age­ment is choos­ing to pay you far less than they could. Instead, man­age­ment is shift­ing more mon­ey to the already very wealthy. The rich­est 10 per­cent of Amer­i­cans own 84 per­cent of the val­ue of shares of stock. The Nation­al Insti­tute on Retire­ment Secu­ri­ty found that 57 per­cent of work­ing-age adults — over 100 mil­lion peo­ple — do not have any retire­ment account assets, and for peo­ple with retire­ment accounts, the medi­an account bal­ance is $0.

In their most recent full fis­cal years, 27 out of the 30 com­pa­nies that make up the Dow Jones Indus­tri­al Aver­age repur­chased shares, spend­ing a com­bined $220.3 bil­lion. All 30 com­pa­nies issued div­i­dends total­ing $158.2 billion.

With those pay­ments to share­hold­ers, Amer­i­can Express, Chevron, Cis­co, Exxon Mobile, Gold­man Sachs, Home Depot, John­son & John­son, JP Mor­gan Chase, Mer­ck, Microsoft, Pfiz­er and Proc­ter and Gam­ble all could have dou­bled work­er pay.

For exam­ple, Home Depot employed 413,000 work­ers through­out North Amer­i­ca, pay­ing a medi­an wage of $21,095, which was below the U.S. pover­ty line for a fam­i­ly of four in 2017. But it paid share­hold­ers $12.2 bil­lion, or $29,540 per work­er. Home Depot could have dou­bled worker’s wages and still giv­en almost $3.5 bil­lion to shareholders.

Nike, Coca-Cola and Visa each could have quadru­pled the pay of their medi­an employ­ee with the cash they sent to share­hold­ers. Nike paid a medi­an wage of $24,955, which is under the pover­ty thresh­old for a fam­i­ly of four, but spent $58,194 per work­er on share repur­chas­es and $17,004 per work­er on div­i­dends. Coca-Cola paid a medi­an wage of $47,312 but gave share­hold­ers $162,136 per employ­ee. Visa’s medi­an wage was a healthy $132,483, but it gave share­hold­ers $535,882 per worker.

B­­y far the worst exam­ple was Apple. For its fis­cal year that end­ed Sep­tem­ber 29, 2018, Apple spent an incred­i­ble $72.7 bil­lion repur­chas­ing shares and dis­trib­uted anoth­er $13.7 bil­lion in div­i­dends. Apple’s medi­an wage was $55,426, while it gave share­hold­ers $654,924 per work­er, more than 11 times the medi­an wage of their 132,000 employees.

It’s dif­fi­cult to quan­ti­fy the econ­o­my-wide impact of this shift in wealth. In 2017, the U.S. medi­an house­hold income was $61,372. Medi­an income for men was $44,408 and medi­an income for women was $31,610. Imag­ine if sev­er­al mil­lion work­ers had an extra $10,000 a year to spend on their fam­i­lies. Or $20,000. Or $100,000. Much of that mon­ey would cir­cu­late in local economies rather than sit­ting in a small num­ber of invest­ment accounts.

Even if stock buy­backs are curbed, as leg­is­la­tion intro­duced by Sen­a­tor Tam­my Bald­win (D‑WI) aims to do, work­er wages can still be divert­ed to div­i­dend pay­ments, or com­pa­nies can sim­ply sit on piles of cash, as many have been doing. The Reward Work Act also pro­pos­es that work­ers pick one third of the boards of pub­licly trad­ed com­pa­nies, which would attempt to address one root cause of the prob­lem: most work­ers have very lit­tle say in what hap­pens to the wealth their labor creates.

A bet­ter solu­tion would be to make it eas­i­er for work­ers to join a union. It’s not sur­pris­ing that income inequal­i­ty has risen as pri­vate sec­tor union­iza­tion has dropped. Unions give work­ers a seat at the table to nego­ti­ate how a company’s prof­its are spent. Right now, with pri­vate sec­tor union­iza­tion at one of its low­est points over the last 100 years, there’s no check on cor­po­ra­tions fur­ther enrich­ing the wealthy at the expense of their workforce.

The chart below looks at the most recent fis­cal year of all 30 com­pa­nies that make up the Dow Jones Indus­tri­al Aver­age. The analy­sis, for the most part, doesn’t reflect the high­er share repur­chas­es expect­ed to be report­ed for 2018 due to cor­po­rate tax cuts.

Note: The data is for the most recent fis­cal year report­ed on each company’s Form 10‑K and Proxy State­ment. The medi­an work­er pay for each com­pa­ny is what was report­ed in the most recent Proxy State­ment as is now required by the Dodd-Frank finan­cial reform act. There are some lim­i­ta­tions to using this fig­ure: Com­pa­nies include in their cal­cu­la­tion work­ers from around the world and both full- and part-time work­ers, and com­pa­nies can include the val­ue of employ­er pro­vid­ed health insur­ance and retire­ment benefits.