Chicago alderman Ed Smith tried to fight plans for Walmart to open a new store in his city by illustrating that its CEO Michael Duke’s $35 million annual compensation, “when converted to an hourly wage, worked out to $16,826.92,” ABC News reported. “By comparison, at a Walmart store planned for the Windy City’s Pullman neighborhood, new employees to be paid $8.75 an hour would gross $13,650 a year.”
Walmart didn’t see a problem with this disparity, which isn’t as unusual as it should be.
“We’ve seen, over the past three decades, a tenfold-plus increase in the gap between top executives and average American workers,” Institute for Policy Studies Associate Fellow Sam Pizzigati told ABC. “That Chicago alderman is putting his finger on a very real problem in American economic life.”
Want more information on this issue? You can read Pizzigati’s most recent OtherWords op-ed about excessive executive pay or last year’s IPS report on the topic.
