Courtesy of Building and Construction Trades, AFL-CIO

Although we have been hearing about it for years, the pay gap that separates executives from their workers continues to widen, according to a report from two Washington think tanks.

In a report titled "A Decade of Executive Excess," the Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy found top executives now earn 419 times what their workers earn for a year's work. To highlight the acceleration of the gap, the report authors note that chief executive officers earned just 42 times their workers' wages as recently as 1980.

If worker salaries had risen at the same pace as their bosses, the average production worker would be earning more than $110,000 this year, according to the report. And the minimum wage would have gone up to $22.08 per hour instead of the current $5.15, the authors added.

The report noted the average compensation for a CEO at a large company was $10.6 million, up from $1.8 million in 1990. And last year, average executive compensation rose 36 percent, compared to 2.7 percent for the average blue collar worker.

"It just keeps growing. There seems to be no limits to what American society will accept," commented Sarah Anderson, of the Institute of Policy Studies, one of the report's authors.

But people are aware of the gulf between their paycheck and that of their bosses. AFL-CIO economic researcher Chris Bohner explained the federation drew 4 million "hits" on its Paywatch web site launched in 1997 to inform the public about the widening salary gaps.

He explained the lack of public outrage over the two-class wage scales with the comment: "People are just beaten down, hearing it year after year."

He also pointed out that the 500 percent executive pay wage rise over the past 15 years is three times higher than corporate profits.

The AFL-CIO has cited such lopsided examples as the $575 million in salary and stock options paid to Walt Disney Co. chief executive Michael Eisner last year and the $167 million paid to Citigroup CEO Sanford Weil.

The runaway executive salaries are causing problems for big international mergers. European executive pay is not nearly as inflated as in the U.S., resulting in anomalies such as Chrysler auto execs earning more than their bosses at Daimler-Benz.