The AFL-CIO has released its executive paywatch, with a section looking at inequality, Walmart style. And boy, Walmart's inequality is extremely unequal. A Walmart worker would need to
work 1,036 hours at the company's new starting wage of $9 an hour to be paid what CEO Doug McMillon is paid for just one hour.
But McMillon isn't even where the real money is. That's with the Walton family. Last fall, the Economic Policy Institute compared:
... the family wealth of six of the wealthiest members of the Walton family (reported at just under $145 billion in 2013) with the number of American families that you could add together and still have their net worth come in less than the 6 Walton heirs: 52.5 million, or 42.9 percent of American families.
Some have objected to this statistic on the grounds that the negative net worth families (11.5 percent of all American families) somehow shouldn’t count in this calculation. So, try another statistic: how many families that held the median wealth would you need to add together to equal the holdings of the six Walton heirs: more than 1.7 million. The median wealthholder in the United States, remember, has more wealth than half of all American families and less wealth than half (around $81,200 in 2013).
If you add in racial inequality, the picture is
even more unequal:
... arranging non-white families by ascending order of net worth, one would need to aggregate the net worth of the bottom 67.4 percent of non-white families to match the net worth of the Waltons. And it would take 7.9 million families that had the median net worth of non-white families to match the Waltons’ wealth.
We're talking about six people here, and a fortune made on low wages in the United States and throughout a global supply chain. This isn't an accident of inequality, it's a sustained campaign to produce inequality.