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GUEST: Sarah Anderson, co-author of “Executive Excess,” Director of the Global Economy Program at the Institute for Policy Studies

According to a new report CEOs “collected as much money from one day on the job as average workers made over the entire year.” Authored by the the Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy the report “Executive Excess 2007, The Staggering Social Cost of U.S. Business Leadership,” shows that CEOs at the biggest U.S. companies averaged $10.8 million in pay and associated compensation, including stock options, based on data from 386 of the Fortune 500 companies. That figure for CEO salaries equates to more than 364 times the pay of the average American worker with the average American worker salary coming in at $30,000. Furthermore, through tax dodging, creative accounting, and simply benefiting from favorable tax policies, CEO’s are also able to keep more of of their salary in their pockets. This Labor Day, U.S. workers can celebrate the first raise in minimum wage in ten years, bringing it up from $5.15 per hour to $5.85, but that rate in real value is still seven percent below the value of the minimum wage in 1996. Another sobering statistic for this labor day weekend is the fact that over 15 percent of workers

The “Executive Excess” report is available online at www.faireconomy.org/executiveexcess and The Institute for Policy Studies is online at www.ips-dc.org