CEO pay increased 20 times faster than worker pay around the world in 2025, according to a new analysis from Oxfam and the International Trade Union Confederation, the world’s largest trade union federation.
When adjusted for inflation, global worker pay declined 12% between 2019 and 2025, the equivalent of 108 days of free work during that time period. In comparison, CEO compensation increased by 54% between 2019 and 2025.
The average CEO received $8.4m in total compensation in 2025 compared to $7.6m in 2024.
And CEO performance is just as shit as it was in the late 1970s.
What a racket.
Yet guillotine sales remain remarkably flat.
Is there a preponderance of baldness among CEOs?
ceo are psycopath it is stressful to be one, so they lose all thier hair, or they are old white people.
It’s okay because they clearly earned it. Merit based society /s
The photo of Nadella is just the icing on the cake. Driving customers away from Microsoft with his horrible decisions, ruining products. But stock still goes up, and Nadella gets a raise.
He kinda started strong with trying to undo the toxic Ballmer era culture and scrambling to try to catch up on cloud infra. But even back then, the push for crazy excessive telemetry and moving pretty much all of QA into data science was the beginning of the end. And like all tech execs, AI has them losing their GD minds.
Imagine saving all that money if an IA replaces CEOs
Happy May Day.
If people wanna change the world, maybe we should start with this enormous gap and take it from there.
For those wondering where 20x is coming from:
Chief executives of the world’s largest corporations enjoyed an 11 percent real-terms pay hike last year, while the average global worker saw real wages increase by just 0.5 percent, new analysis by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) and Oxfam ahead of International Workers’ Day (May 1) reveals. In other words, top global CEO pay increased 20 times faster than global workers’ pay in 2025.
Here a historic graph for context. Per 2023 the gap has soared 1,085% since 1978.
#edit better graph
All pay rates (not just minimum wage) should be tied to inflation, so any raises are on top of that adjustment. That would of course bankrupt all companies (is what they’ll say).
Doesn’t fix the topic, but it does address the real wage increase of practically nothing.
If the CEO’s get more, then the owner class must have even more.
