'The Gilded Age' Statistics Corporations Don't Want Workers, or Anyone, to See

[Fire Walk With Me]

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If there's one thing about what many are calling the "The New Gilded Age," it's that well-known corporations—not to mention less well-known, but extremely powerful ones—will fight extremely hard to keep secret just how lopsided the economic disparities have become in recent decades between low-paid workers in the society and the executive and ruling class that have reaped the words of a globalized, top-heavy economy.

In but one example, the CEO of JC Penney in 2011 made 1,795 times the amount of money as the average paid worker at the retail chain. Overall, the CEO-to-worker gap is up nearly 20 percent since 2009. What the numbers show, once again, is that in the US economy, some workers are more equal than others.

And as Bloomberg news reports, new disclosure laws designed to reveal the income gap between top executives and regular workers within their companies have been stonewalled by an aggressive lobbying effort at the Security and Exchange Commission. Among the corporations waging war against requirements imposed by the Dodd-Frank financial law are McDonald's, General Electric, and AT&T—all led, according to Bloomberg, by "a Washington-based non-profit called the HR Policy Association, which represents top human resources executives at about 335 large corporations."

From Bloomberg:

Almost three years after Congress ordered public companies to reveal actual CEO-to-worker pay ratios under the Dodd-Frank law, the numbers remain unknown. As the Occupy Wall Street movement and 2012 election made income inequality a social flashpoint, mandatory disclosure of the ratios remained bottled up at the Securities and Exchange Commission, which hasn’t yet drawn up the rules to implement it. Some of America’s biggest companies are lobbying against the requirement.

(More at the link.)