SANDERS GUNS AFTER PENNY-PINCHING BILLIONAIRE CEOs LIKE JEFF BEZOS

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders is gunning after Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos for penny-pinching, preventing his workers in Bessemer, Alabama from joining unions and for earning just too much during the pandemic and not paying the state much for his “ill-gotten wealth.”

Reporting for Truthout on March 20, 2021, Mike Ludwig said Bezos was a no-show during a recent hearing of the Sanders panel, but Jennifer Bates, one of Bezos’s employees, was there to lash out at her boss for not being a fair employer.

Sanders said Bezos is worth $182 billion, making him one of the wealthiest people in the world. If he had shown up for the hearing, Sanders said he would have asked Bezos why he is doing “everything in his power” to prevent workers in Bessemer from joining a union so they can negotiate for better wages, benefits and working conditions.

“We’ll be asking about how it happens that the top one-tenth of 1 percent now owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent,” Sanders said.

“Two individuals — Bezos and [Elon] Musk — now own more wealth than the bottom 40 percent, and meanwhile we are looking at more hunger in American than any time in decades.”

It’s not just Bezos and Musk: The collective wealth of the 651 richest billionaires increased by more than $1 trillion during the pandemic. From his powerful perch on the budget committee, Sanders is taking on the billionaires he so often criticized during the presidential campaign trail and the “crisis of wealth and income inequality” that is the senator’s signature issue.

Sanders and other progressive lawmakers announced legislation that would raise taxes on companies that pay their CEOs at least 50 times more than the average worker, giving companies a choice between closing the wage gap or paying their “fair share” in taxes.

In 1980, CEOs of major companies made an average of 42 times more money than the typical worker, but since 2000, CEOs have made an average of 350 times more than their typical employee, according to testimony submitted to the Senate budget committee by Sarah Anderson of the Institute for Policy Studies.

The wage gap ballooned in the 1990s when employee wages stagnated and executive pay exploded as more companies offered their CEOs compensation in stock. Anderson told the budget committee that, over the past few decades, jobs were outsourced to other countries while millions of others were turned into low-wage, part-time work without benefits, leaving families across the country vulnerable when the pandemic hit.

Even with COVID relief from the government, millions of families have gone hungry during the pandemic, and nearly one in five renters fell behind on rent within nine months.

Nearly 80 percent of S&P 500 companies paid their CEO more than 100 times the median salary for their average worker in 2018, and nearly 10 percent had median pay below the federal poverty line for a family of four, according to Anderson. At the 50 publicly traded US corporations with the widest pay gaps, the typical employee would have to work at least 1,000 years to earn what their CEO does annually.

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