NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Wells Fargo employee Tyrel Oates did what most of us would only dream of doing.

Oates wrote an email to the CEO of the company, John Stumpf, asking for more money. The email went out to the CEO and about 200,000 employees of Wells Fargo & Co. WFC, +0.08% , reported the Charlotte Observer.

The Oregon-based employee asked the CEO distribute more profits to Wells Fargo employees, in the name of reducing income inequality. Oates went further and asked for a $10,000 raise for the approximately 263,500 employees at the firm.

“Show the rest of the United States, if not the world, that, yes, big corporations can have a heart other than philanthropic endeavors,” he said in the email, the newspaper reported. A purported copy of the letter, with Oates’s name left off, is on Reddit here.

In a statement, Wells Fargo said “We provide market competitive compensation that combines base pay with a broad array of benefits and career-development opportunities for team members.”

Oates, who processes requests from customers seeking to stop debt-collection calls, has been working at Wells Fargo for nearly seven years and is paid $15 an hour plus overtime. His pay has gone up from $13 an hour when he started at the bank.

Wells Fargo’s CEO took a 15% pay cut last year and was paid $19.3 million in salary and bonus. Seven years ago, in 2008, Stumpf received total compensation of $13.8 million. That’s a 40% increase for the CEO, while Oates received a 15% increase in the same period.

The 30-year-old‘s bold–faced email highlights a bigger concern of rising income inequality in the nation. It speaks to two big issues: The growing disparity in income between the so-called haves and have-nots, and wage stagnation since the crisis.

Most Americans have received paltry pay increases in the last several years.

The latest Labor Department jobs report showed that, while hiring has steadily increased since the financial crisis, wage growth remained stagnant.

In 2011, the average income of the richest 10% in the U.S. was 14 times more than the poorest 10%, according to the Gini coefficient, a measure of income inequality, wrote Morgan Stanley economists in a recent report. The trend shows income inequality has been on the rise since the late 1960s.

The median household income in 2013 of $51,939 was not statistically different from 2012 at $51,759, according to the latest government data.

Part of the reason for the rise in income inequality is education. Individuals who do not earn a college degree face a lifetime of uncertain prospects for income and employment, say economists.

“Income inequality is one of the best measures of how serious the great recession was and how it hurt the middle class and lower income,” said Chris G. Christopher Jr., director of U.S. macroeconomics at IHS Global Insights. “In 2013, the median household income adjusted for inflation was still 8% below its 2007.”

The financial meltdown came on top of the consumer and business downturn that was very severe. The recovery was extremely anemic and has not come back to trend, said Christopher.