Report: CEO pay more than 300 times average workers in 2014

Benjamin F Mitchell | USA TODAY

The United States' chief executive officers made 303 times as much as the average worker in 2014, according to a report from the Economic Policy Institute to be released Monday.

The report from the left-leaning think tank found that average CEO compensation for the largest firms was $16.3 million in 2014, an increase of 3.9% from last year and 54.3% since the end of the financial crisis in 2009.

But not only are CEOs making more money than the average worker, they're also making more money than other top wage earners. CEO compensation in 2013 was almost six times higher than others in the top 0.1% of earners, according to the report.

"The claim is that high CEO pay is a marker for talent," says Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute and co-author of the report, who disagrees with the notion that the extraordinarily high compensation of executives is proportional to the skill required to run a large, publicly traded company.

"This data would suggest that executives are not only 300 times more talented than the average worker, but also six times more talented and valuable than other people in the top one-thousandth of earners."

Since 1978, inflation-adjusted CEO pay has jumped 997%, almost double stock market growth, while wage growth for the average worker grew only 10.9% over the same period, the report says.

The AFL-CIO unveiled a report in May that reached similar conclusions, finding that CEOs made 373 times more than the average worker.

EPI's report comes at a time when income inequality is of increasing concern. According to a Gallup Poll, 63% of Americans say that money and wealth distribution in the U.S. is unfair.

The EPI report suggests that rising CEO pay has pulled pay for other executives and managers along with it, contributing to the rise in income shares for the top 1% and 0.1% of earners since 1979.

In 2013, the median wealth of the nation's upper-income families was almost seven times higher than the median wealth of middle-income families, the widest gap on record, according to data from the Pew Research Center.

Mishel argues that CEOs and executives are seeing exponential growth in pay at the expense of average workers.

"The evidence says that the extraordinary growth in pay does not correspond to increased productivity. The pie hasn't grown, in other words, but CEOs are cutting themselves a bigger slice," he says.