From the 1930s through the ’80s, the top three executives at the fifty largest U.S. corporations were paid between thirty and sixty times as much as their average employee. But then in just a dozen years, that ratio quadrupled, so that by 2003 those three top bosses on average were earning 219 times as much as their average employee. The ratio between the pay of the average worker and that of the CEO climbed even higher and remains close to three hundred. Some U.S. CEOs—at Starbucks and Disney, for instance—are paid one thousand times more than their median employee.
