Media

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.

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. 

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.

States have disinvested in public higher education and students have been stuck paying the tag.

Executive pay has risen dramatically—both in absolute terms and in relation to median wages—across the last generation. The spike in executive salaries is both a key driver of inequality at the top end of the income spectrum (about half of the “1 percent” are executives or managers at non-financial firms) and a symbolic marker of social norms in our “winner-take-all” economy. Conservative economists have tried to spin this as a triumph of market forces, manifesting the ability of superstar innovators to pull away from the pack in a global, wired economy.