Skip to main content

At This Company, the CEO Makes 6,000 Times a Typical Worker's Pay

Aimee Picchi
Social share icons

It's no secret that the financial divide between CEOs and average worker in the U.S. has been growing. But in one case, the pay gap between corporate chiefs and employees has reached almost 6,000-to-1: Weight Watchers, where CEO Mindy Grossman earned 5,908 times what the median worker took home last year.

That's according to a new analysis of publicly reported compensation data by the AFL-CIO, the federation of unions. This year, public companies are for the first time required to compare the compensation of their CEO to a typical employee, data that the AFL-CIO analyzed along with its annual executive pay analysis. 

Many of the companies with the largest pay differential between their CEOs and workers are in service industries such as fast food and retail, where workers tend to work fewer hours and earn low wages. Across the board, CEOs are enjoying larger-than-average increases in comp, with the average pay rising 6.4 percent to $13.94 million in 2017. 

Worker pay has been stagnant for almost half a century, the AFL-CIO said. The overall ratio of CEO to worker pay now stands at 361 to 1, more than quadruple what it was nearly 40 years ago.

Read the full article.