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THE LOW-WAGE 100  
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Sarah Anderson
August 25, 2025
CounterPunch
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_ Starbucks takes the prize for the most obscene corporate pay
disparities of 2024. But jaw-dropping gaps are the norm among
America’s leading low-wage corporations. _

, Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

 

The gap between CEO compensation and median worker pay at Starbucks
hit 6,666 to 1 last year. In other words, to make as much money as
their CEO made last year, typical baristas would’ve had to start
brewing macchiatos around the time humans first invented the wheel.

Starbucks takes the prize for the most obscene corporate pay
disparities of 2024. But jaw-dropping gaps are the norm among
America’s leading low-wage corporations.

This year’s edition of the annual Institute for Policy Studies
_Executive Excess_ report
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the 100 S&P 500 firms with the lowest median wages, a group we’ve
dubbed the “Low-Wage 100,” have enjoyed skyrocketing pay over the
past six years.

THE LOW-WAGE 100

In 2024, average compensation for Low-Wage 100 top executives rose to
$17.2 million, up 34.7 percent since 2019 (not adjusted for
inflation). Global median worker pay at these firms stood at just
$35,570, after increasing at a nominal rate of only 16.3 percent since
2019 – significantly below the 22.6 percent U.S. inflation rate. The
Low-Wage 100 pay ratio increased 12.9 percent to 632 to 1 over the
past half decade.

BUYBACKS BONANZA

Here’s yet another sign of the Low-Wage 100’s skewed priorities:
between 2019 and 2024 these firms spent a combined $644 billion on
stock buybacks. This once-illegal financial maneuver artificially
inflates the value of a company’s shares and, in the process, pumps
up the value of CEOs’ stock-based compensation. Even the most inept
executives can rake in vast fortunes through this scam.

Every dollar spent on buybacks represents a dollar _not_ spent on
workers. The tradeoffs can be downright staggering. At Lowe’s, for
instance, every one of their 273,000 employees could’ve gotten an
annual $28,456 bonus over the past six years with the money the
retailer blew on stock buybacks. Lowe’s median worker pay in 2024:
$30,606.

If McDonald’s had spent their buyback outlays on worker bonuses
during this period, they could’ve given all their employees an extra
$18,338 per year — more than that company’s median wage.

Siphoning resources from workers to make CEOs even richer is
especially outrageous at a time when so many Americans are struggling
with high costs for groceries, housing, and other essentials.

Stock buybacks also divert resources from capital investments vital to
long-term growth, such as employee training or upgrading technology,
equipment, and properties.

At 56 Low-Wage 100 companies, outlays for stock buybacks actually
_exceeded_ capital expenditures between 2019 and 2024. If we exclude
Amazon, a CapEx outlier, the Low-Wage 100 as a whole spent
considerably more on buybacks than on capital expenditures over this
six-year period.

Extensive research
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has also shown that excessive CEO compensation is bad for business
because extreme internal pay disparities undermine employee morale and
boost turnover rates.

SOLUTIONS TO EXECUTIVE EXCESS

As poll
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after poll
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after poll
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shown, Americans across the political spectrum are fed up with
overpaid CEOs and want government action. In one rather amusing recent
survey
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80 percent of workers said they view corporate CEOs as overpaid, and
nearly 70 percent said they do not believe their own company’s CEO
could do the job they do for even one week.

How could policymakers incentivize more equitable pay practices?
Several bills [[link removed]] in
the U.S. Congress and state legislatures would increase taxes on
corporations with huge CEO-worker pay gaps. Polls suggest this would
be enormously popular. In onesurvey
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likely voters, 89 percent of Democrats, 77 percent of Independents,
and 71 percent of Republicans said they’d like to see tax hikes on
companies that pay their CEOs more than 50 times what they pay their
median employees.

Congress could also increase the 1 percent excise tax
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on stock buybacks that went into effect in 2023. If that tax had been
set at 4 percent, the Low-Wage 100 would have owed approximately $6.3
billion in additional federal taxes on their share repurchases during
the past two years. That revenue would’ve been enough to cover the
cost of 327,218
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public housing units for two years.

Policymakers have ample tools for tackling the problem of runaway CEO
pay. Now they just need to listen to their constituents and get the
job done.

_SARAH ANDERSON directs the Global Economy Project at the Institute
for Policy Studies._

 

* CEO Pay
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