Executive PayWatch: CEO Salaries Soar, Again

While Corporate America sits on a record $1.93 trillion in cash that could be creating jobs, CEOs are laughing all the way to the bank: Their fat paychecks got even bigger in 2010.

In fact, CEOs at 299 top U.S. companies averaged $11.4 million last year, 23 percent more than in 2009, according to the AFL-CIO's Executive PayWatch website.

Just updated for 2011, the detailed and interactive website joins a deluge of reports documenting the ever-widening gap between America's rich and everyone else. You can learn, for example, that Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf raked in nearly $19 million in 2010, 632 times the median pay (about $30,000) for secretaries in the United States.

Among the site's many applications, you can search for information on companies in your own state. You can also search by industry, find ample details about the 100 highest-paid CEOs, and compare their salaries to nurses, police officers, teachers, minimum wage earners and other workers.

The database, at www.paywatch.org, is an important tool as CWA and other unions wage a broad campaign to strengthen Wall Street reform, close corporate tax loopholes and protect America's working families from further corporate greed.