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Starbucks’ coffee isn’t the only thing at the company that’s amped up.
Its CEO, Brian Niccol, made a whopping 6,666 times more than the company’s typical employee last year, according to the AFL-CIO’s annual Executive Paywatch report, released Wednesday. It was the widest pay gap by far between the top executive and median worker among the nation’s 500 largest public companies listed in the report.
Niccol, who took over the company’s helm last September, received nearly $98 million in compensation, compared to the typical Starbucks worker’s pay of less than $15,000, according to the report, which drew from corporate filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Starbucks is but one example of the hefty pay gap between America’s corporate leaders and their workers, which grew even larger in 2024.
CEOs at the largest public companies took home $18.9 million last year, or 285 times as much as the typical US worker’s paycheck of $49,500. That’s up from a ratio of 268 to 1 a year earlier, according to the AFL-CIO, a powerful federation of labor unions representing 15 million workers.
The typical employee would have had to start working in 1740 to earn what the average CEO received in 2024, the report noted.
CEO pay at S&P 500 companies increased 7% in 2024 from the prior year. It topped the prior peak of $18.3 million in 2021, though the ratio was 324 to 1 that year. The typical private sector worker’s raise last year was 3%, the AFL-CIO said, citing Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
At Starbucks, the typical worker is a part-time barista in the US, the company said in its SEC filing. It noted that many of its employees work in part-time, flexible positions, which has the effect of lowering the compensation level of its median employee. Also, the calculation includes its global workforce of about 361,000 staffers, not just the roughly 210,000 US-based workers.
Some staffers at the coffee retailer have formed a union, Starbucks Workers United, and have staged strikes at various locations in recent years. Among their demands is a wage increase.
It’s “no wonder why the workers there at Starbucks are fighting to form a union with the Starbucks Workers Union to improve their pay and working conditions,” Fred Redmond, AFL-CIO’s secretary-treasurer, told reporters. “And these numbers only begin to scratch the surface of how runaway executive pay is fueling economic inequality.”
Starbucks did not immediately return a request for comment.
In its report this year, the AFL-CIO highlighted that the sweeping tax and spending cuts package that President Donald Trump signed into law on July 4 will provide CEOs with far bigger tax breaks than workers.
The average CEO will receive a tax cut of nearly $490,000 from the permanent extension of the lower individual income tax rates, which were initially reduced in Trump’s 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the report found. That compares to a $765 tax break for the typical US worker.
Unlike workers, salaries are not the largest component of CEOs’ compensation. Nearly half of the top executives’ total pay was restricted stock awards, and another $4 million were bonuses.
The highest-paid CEO of an S&P 500 company was Patrick Smith of Axon Enterprise, which manufactures Tasers and other weapons for law enforcement and the military. He received a package of nearly $165 million.
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