Wednesday, April 20, 2005
[IWS] Wal-Mart's Pay Gap: CEO Compensation 871 times higher than U.S. Wal-Mart Workers [15 April 2005]
IWS Documented News Service
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Institute for Workplace Studies
School of Industrial & Labor Relations
Cornell University
16 East 34th Street, 4th floor
New York, NY 10016
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Institute for Policy Studies
Wal-Mart's Pay Gap
CEO Compensation 871 times as high as
U.S. Wal-Mart Workers, 50,000 times as much as Chinese Workers [15 April 2005]
http://www.ips-dc.org/projects/global_econ/walmart_pay_gap.htm
or
http://www.ips-dc.org/projects/global_econ/Wal-mart_pay_gap.pdf
[full-text, 4 pages]
Wal-Mart company documents released April 15 reveal that CEO H. Lee Scott, Jr., made $17,543,739 in total compensation last year nearly twice the average of $9.6 million for leading U.S. CEOs as a whole, according to Business Week. Thomas Coughlin, the Vice Chair of the board who recently was accused by Wal-Mart officials of spending company money on personal items such as alligator skin cowboy boots, has had some of his compensation suspended, but not his $1 million-plus salary.
Wal-Marts generous compensation for top executives contrasts sharply with the wages of the people who produced or sold the goods that earned the company $10.3 billion in profits on sales of $285 billion last year.
Pay for American Wal-Mart Workers
Currently, according to Wal-Mart, the firms full-time U.S. employees earn on average $9.68 per hour. (The firm has not released pay figures for the 26 percent of its employees that, according to Wal-Mart, work part-time. Some analysts estimate that actual average pay is considerably lower.) Wal-Marts full-time pay rate of $9.68 is about 37 percent lower than the national average wage of $15.35 for production and non-supervisory workers. As a result of Wal-Marts low wages, many employees of the worlds largest company must rely on government healthcare, food, housing and other aid. A study by Congressional Democratic staff estimated that Wal-Mart workers receive on average $2,103 per year in federal subsidies alone.
AND MUCH MORE...including TABLES....
Sources: CEO: Wal-Mart proxy statement, April 15, 2005; U.S. employees: Wal-Mart, <http://www.walmartfacts.com/>; Subcontractors: Information for Indonesia, Nicaragua, Swaziland, and Bangladesh based on interviews with garment workers conducted in 2004 by the International Labor Rights Fund. Data for China from National Labor Committee, Toys of Misery 2004,February 2004.
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