For Every $1 Raise Workers Received, Executives Got $500 More

The executive class gobbles up much more of total pay than workers.

By David Cay Johnston, DC Report

Here’s the real news on your 2021 pay raise, thanks to exclusive reporting by DCReport.

The Executive Class received $500 for every dollar in raises you earned last year, my annual analysis of the latest official pay data shows.

If you worked full-time and made less than $250,000, your average pay increase last year was $1,600.

For the Executive Class paid $1 million or more, the average pay increase was $840,500—500 times as much.

Average pay increases for the 97.3% of full-time workers making under $250,000 fell far short of the 4.7% U.S inflation rate, rising just 2.7%. That means the vast majority of full-time workers lost almost $1,200 of buying power.

Meanwhile, Executive Class pay rose 40.7% in 2021, nearly nine times more than the inflation rate. And it wasn’t an isolated response to pandemic economics.

The number of Executive Class workers exploded in 2021, up from 184,631 in 2020. That’s a 29% growth in just one year for Executive Class employees compared to an overall growth rate in paid workers at any wage of 0.3%. In other words, the number of people in the Executive Class is growing more than 100 times faster than the overall pool of employees.