A new analysis of the pay practices of 22 major American companies found that over the course of the pandemic, the overwhelming majority of the gains made went to shareholders rather than workers.
In the first 22 months of the pandemic, the average real wage gain was between 2 percent and 5 percent through October of 2021, though recent inflation probably means that wage gain is actually a bit of a wash. The 7 million workers for those companies, all told, received $27 billion in aggregate pay..
..which at first sounds neat, until you hear that the shareholders of the 22 companies all told grew $1.5 trillion richer — 57 times the worker pay hikes — and that just 13 billionaire founders and heirs of those companies got $160 billion richer.