Next Time Someone Tells You CEO Pay Should go to Employees

We repeatedly see complaints about how much CEOs are paid when the question of minimum wage hikes comes up, with the implication (or outright claim) that if the CEO and executives were paid less, the minimum wage hike wouldn’t be a problem.

After running across one of these, I decided to do a little research.

This year the CEO of Wal-Mart will make $25,600,000 in combined salary and other payments. (Source)

According to Wikipedia, Wal-Mart employs 2.2 million people.

If we took the CEO’s pay, in it’s entirety, and distributed it to the employees, they would make for a whopping $11.64 raise. A year.

Or a little under six tenths of a cent per hour for full time employees.

In fact, if you add up the salaries for the six executives named in the story I referenced for the CEO’s salary, and distributed all of it to the remaining employees, you would get about $32.63 a year more. That’s under 1.2 cents an hour for full time employees. If you were working 10 hours a week, you would see less than 5 cents an hour additional.

Keep that in mind the next time someone says we should reduce executive pay to raise the minimum wage.