Inside these posts: Bureau of Labor Statistics

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CEOs earn 343 times more than typical workers

In 2010, chief executives at some of the nation’s largest companies earned an average of $11.4 million in total pay — 343 times more than a typical American worker, according to the AFL-CIO.

“Despite the collapse of the financial market at the hands of executives less than 3 years ago, the disparity between CEO and workers’ pay has continued to grow to levels that are simply stunning,“ said Richard Trumka, AFL-CIO president. Get the full story »

Only 11.9% of workers in a union

The nation’s labor unions saw another sharp decline in membership last year even as the economic recovery began and job losses slowed.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics says unions lost 612,000 members in 2010. That drops the unionized share of the work force to 11.9 percent from 12.3 percent in 2009.

Union membership in the private sector fell from 7.2 percent to 6.9 percent, a low point not seen since the infancy of the labor movement in the 1930s. The steepest decline was among construction workers. Get the full story »

Govt: No call for Social Security increase in 2011

As if voters don’t have enough to be angry about this election year, the government is expected to announce this week that more than 58 million Social Security recipients will go through another year without an increase in their monthly benefits. It would mark only the second year without an increase since automatic adjustments for inflation were adopted in 1975. The first year was this year. Get the full story »

Gender pay gap is the smallest on record

From USA Today | Women earned 82.8 percent of the median weekly wage men do in the second quarter of 2010, the smallest pay gap ever recorded by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The dramatic gains in the last decade — women earned 76.1 percent of men’s wages in the same period a decade ago — has been attributed, in part, to hits men’s wages are taking in the recession. Get the full story >>