AFL-CIO Blog

Throughout the pandemic, CBB has heard from bank workers across the country about the lack of safety measures and financial protections both for employees and their customers. This led us to do a deep, comprehensive review of how U.S. banks have responded to COVID-19 and ensure that, as new cases are skyrocketing, bank executives know what they must improve. While banks’ poor grades did not surprise us, the inconsistencies across the banking industry around worker and customer protections is truly alarming and speaks to the urgent need to secure a place at the table for front-line workers. In 2008, taxpayers ended up footing the bill for bailing out Wall Street and big banks for malfeasance perpetrated on millions of homeowners, while working people lost their homes and were left struggling. With 30 percent of Americans missing their housing payments in June and experts warning of a looming housing apocalypse, we cannot afford to make that same mistake again.

• Form a committee to develop industrywide policies in support of the health and financial well-being of front-line workers and consumers.
• Provide front-line workers with increased protections, including hazard pay, paid sick leave, adequate personal protective equipment and job security.
• Increase employment levels, improve training and transparency of policies to ensure communities, ensure customers and small businesses receive the real financial support they need, including increased flexibility for customers in need and waiving fees for customers, while maximizing support for small businesses.

With the COVID-19 shutdowns earlier this year, we saw many CEOs take salary cuts as a token of their solidarity with furloughed workers. While these CEO salary cuts made for good headlines, they are mostly window dressing. Base salary makes up less than 8% of total compensation for CEOs of S&P 500 companies. Most CEO pay is in equity awards. The real story in executive compensation was that companies ramped up their equity awards to senior executives at the beginning of this year. Meanwhile, millions of working people have been furloughed or laid off due to COVID-19 related shutdowns. This disparity represents a fundamental imbalance in our economy. Working people are being treated as disposable employees. Now these cast-off workers, as a result of COVID-19, are at risk of having their unemployment benefits cut.

• In 2019, CEOs of S&P 500 companies received, on average, $14.8 million in total compensation.
• The average S&P 500 company CEO-to-worker pay ratio was 264-to-1.
• S&P 500 CEO pay has increased, on average, $3.4 million over the past 10 years. Meanwhile during the same period of time, the average U.S. production and nonsupervisory worker’s pay increased just $8,360. From 2018 to 2019, the average production and nonsupervisory worker received barely more than a $1,500 raise, bringing their total pay to $41,442.
• Abercrombie & Fitch had the highest disclosed ratio of CEO-to-worker pay of any public company: 4,293-to-1. Abercrombie’s CEO received $8.4 million in total compensation compared to the company’s median worker who received less than $2,000 in compensation.