The Oregonian’s weekly look at the numbers behind the state’s economy. View past installments here.

The people running many of Oregon’s largest companies got raises last year – big ones. Yet their employees’ wages barely budged.

We know this because of new federal regulations that require publicly traded companies to disclose the ratio between what their CEOs make and workers’ median pay.

Regulators haven’t set firm criteria for how companies calculate employee wages so there’s a lot of variation in methodology. That means it’s hard to make a direct comparison between the pay ratios at, say, Columbia Sportswear and Greenbrier.

However, individual companies do appear to use similar methodology year-to-year. That makes annual comparisons possible.

Among 17 big Oregon employers and companies based here, the median CEO wage climbed 13% last year to $10.7 million.

Workers’ median wage was unchanged at $58,422. (See a full rundown at the bottom of this article.)

Portland has a unique approach to CEO pay, due to a tax adopted in 2016. It taxes corporations that do business in the city – even if their headquarters are elsewhere – and pay their CEOs more than 100 times the salary of the median worker.

The tax collected $3.5 million in its first year and Portland expects a similar amount in the second year. That’s a tiny share of the city’s $730 million general fund but it’s roughly equivalent to the salaries (but not benefits) of 30 police officers.

Former Commissioner Steve Novick pitched the ordinance as “a tax on inequality itself,” though he and supporters never suggested it would actually prompt corporations to rein in CEO pay.

And it clearly hasn’t. In aggregate, the CEOs of the 17 corporations in The Oregonian/OregonLive tally made 216 times what they paid their median worker last year. That’s up from 187-to-1 the prior year.

Nike, Oregon’s biggest company, will pay incoming CEO John Donahoe a signing bonus worth up to $45 million – more than 1,800 times what the company’s median worker earns in a year.

Such disparities have others considering a tax like Portland’s.

Earlier this month, presidential hopeful Sen. Bernie Sanders and two other Democratic lawmakers pitched a proposal to tax companies that pay their CEOs more than 50 times the median worker pay.

San Francisco voters will have their say on a CEO pay tax next November, while Washington and at least five other states are considering similar measures.

-- Mike Rogoway | twitter: @rogoway | 503-294-7699