I'm not a mathematician but 471:1 seems like an awful disparity that if corrected would make a huge difference in both pay raises and employee morale.
I'd like to see your numbers.
No doubt, 471:1 looks like a really high ratio because it is a really high ratio. But 471/1000 employees is a bigger number than 471/3000 employees.
Admittedly, I have only done spot checks at random off the Forbes list so those are the numbers I'm referring to. The thing is, most of the guys at the very top are either part of the ownership of the company (which is an additional and separate allocation of profit) or are cashing in one-time stock options or other forms of compensation that were earned over a period of several years, not just one year.
This is what Forbes says about in the preface to their top-10 list:
Highest-Paid Bosses
The CEOs of America's 500 biggest companies got a collective pay raise of 16% last year earning total compensation of $5.2 billion. That's an average $10.5 million apiece. Exercised stock options and vested stock awards account for 60% of total pay for this group of 500 firms. Those components of compensation is the reason these CEOs are on list of highest-paid.
The top CEO was the guy at the head of McKesson Pharma with $131M - he stands alone at that figure and is clearly the exception to the rule rather than a typical example of it. .
The No. 2 guy was Ralph Lauren of Ralph Lauren at less than half that - $66.7M. But he's not a great example to use because he's part of the ownership of the company and it literally would never have come into existence but for him. There are a couple more heads below him that were part of the company's founding or ownership, so let's start with the #5 guy on the Forbes list, who doesn't appear to be part of the ownership.
David Cote of Honeywell (which I doubt employs very many working poor workers).
One-year total compensation ($MIL): $55.8
Cote's bonus ($23.3 million) was tied to Honeywell's 13% sales growth and 19% segment profit growth in 2011. Honeywell's stock was up 2% in 20011 and up 15% year-to-date.
Honeywell employs 129,000 people and had revenues of almost $39B in 2015. By my count, Mr Cote's grossly excessive compensation amounts to $432 per year per employee, or a bit less than $.21 per hour (Gross). In other words, if that guy actually worked for free - which isn't a reasonable expectation - then it would not show up at all in his employees' weekly pay.
Now that's an extreme example of what I'm saying but there are others.
The next guy on the Forbes list is George Paez of Express Scripts, at $55.1M. He got the pay bump in part because he just closed a big merger merger with Medco this year. Anyways, his company employs 25,900 people, so his pay amounts to $1,988/year per employee, or an average of just under $1 per hour. Again, that's another company that I doubt employs a large percentage of the working poor.
So yeah, I fully agree that the message these CEO salaries send sux ass and that the comparisons make a great talking point, but apart from what the ownership of these various companies take in profit, the hired CEOs pay doesn't seem to be the big reason why labor rates in the U.S. are what they are.
Don't forget that many of the American CEOs oversee companies that do business, generate revenues and have employees worldwide, so dividing their income by only the number of U.S. workers gets real misleading real quickly. Moreover, big business these days frequently mark up the goods and services they sell that were actually produced on contract with other companies that have their own CEOs.