Media

Here's a quick question about your retirement savings: When was the last time you checked the fees on your 401(k)?

If you're like most Americans, chances are you're not sure what exactly your plan is charging you. Even though employers are now required to disclose more information about 401(k) fees, only about half of workers said they actually noticed the data, while just 14 percent made changes after reviewing the information, according to a 2013 study from the Employee Benefit Research Institute.

There’s been alarm raised recently over the decline in college enrollment over the past two years. Some have even gone so far as to argue that this decline is the result of masses of young people realizing that college “isn’t worth it”, even though the college wage premium—the gap between the average wages of college grads and those with less education—

President Obama has spent a lot of time in Asia talking about the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the big trade deal that negotiators have been working on for a few years. But all that energy is probably for naught, at least for the time being, since the TPP isn't going anywhere in Congress anytime soon. I could say more about the TPP, but I'll spare you, since most people don't share my fascination with global trade. 

No less a capitalist than Henry Ford believed in paying his workforce enough so that the men who built his cars could buy his cars too. At McDonald’s, employees are encouraged to apply for food stamps if they aren’t making enough to eat.

If you want a glimpse of super-sized pay inequality, look no further than America’s fast-food industry.

Nowhere is company-level pay disparity more apparent than in fast food, where CEOs reportedly take home $1,000 for every $1 earned by their typical employee.

Domino’s Pizza boss J Patrick Doyle is getting too large a slice of the pie, shareholders will tell the company’s board at the fast food chain’s annual meeting on Tuesday.

The two largest shareholder advisory groups, ISS and Glass Lewis; CalSTRS, California’s $183bn teachers’ pension fund; and Change to Win investment group, which advises trade union-sponsored pension funds, have all voiced concerns about compensation at the pizza company ahead of Tuesday’s annual shareholder meeting in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

It’s the end of April—and probably safe to say the Kwasi Enin thing is played out. I’m going to be “that guy” who annoyingly resurrects a topic long after everyone else in the convo has buried it. While Kwasi’s specific headline may have had a one-week expiration date, the American media manufactures these frenzies every so often.

The American economy overall is ferociously unequal, but some sectors are more unequal than others. A new study from the left-leaning think tank Demos looked at CEO-to-worker compensation ratios across the labor force in an attempt to determine where inequality is most concentrated. The answer probably won’t surprise you.