Democratic lawmakers want companies to pay up for massive CEO compensation

At 45 major U.S. companies, the CEO took home 1,000 times — or more — what a median worker earned in 2019 and 2020, according to the AFL-CIO. Now, as many American workers are struggling to get by during the coronavirus pandemic, a group of lawmakers unveiled a new proposal to take on the extreme gaps between CEO and worker pay in the United States.

The "Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act" would penalize companies that pay CEOs or other highest paid employees 50 times more than the median pay for workers. If the median employee pay was $55,000 per year, a CEO could still make up to $2.75 million before the penalty kicked in. While CEOs have always made more than rank-and-file workers, the ratio has ballooned in recent decades — and wages for top executives have increased dramatically faster than average workers'.  The Economic Policy Institute found CEO compensation had surged 940% from 1978 to 2018 while the typical worker pay had risen only 12% over the same timeframe.