Excessive Pay Exposed
by the AFL-CIO

Workers of the WorldWide Web Unite!

The enormous fees of movie stars are well known but less publicized is the fact that the average CEO makes more than 100 times the pay of the average worker.Now the AFL-CIO has started a new interactive site on the Internet. The Executive Paywatch website allows users to look up CEO compensation packages at any public U.S. company by providing a link to the Securities and Exchange Commission website.

For example, Lawrence Coss, chief executive officer and chairman of Green Tree Financial Corp. in Minnesota, made a bundle last year. His company sells mobile homes not palaces but he received a $102.5 million bonus and was granted $38.8 million in stock options in addition to his relatively modest $443,608 annual salary, for a total of $141.3 million for 1996. The website allows you to calculate how long it would take you to earn what a CEO makes in a year. The average hard-working Guild assistant, at $46,000 a year, would have to work more than 3,000 years to make what Mr. Coss made last year.

CEO pay, which jumped 20% last year while corporate profits grew only 11% and workers' wages rose just 3.3%, is now 212 times greater than the average worker's pay, up from 44 times greater in 1965, according to the AFL-CIO.

By shedding light on chief executive officers' salaries, bonuses and stock options, AFL-CIO officials are hoping the new website will stir activism among workers as shareholders or participants in pension and mutual funds.

"We're here to make employees active owners," says Bill Patterson, director of the AFL-CIO's office of investment. "Active ownership is going to be the way that CEO's are reined in."