Message for this Labor Day
As the economy began to stall last year and companies laid off workers, chief executives of big corporations still got hefty pay raises and were rewarded for making job cuts.

There has been a particularly blatant pattern of CEOs benefiting at the expense of their workers. Chief executives of the 52 major companies that announced layoffs of at least 1000 employees earned some 80 percent more on average than CEOs at 365 big corpoations surveyed by Buseness Week magazine. The layoff leaders recieved an average $23.7 million compared with $13.1 million overall in this group. These top job cutters got an average increase in salary and bonus of nearly 20% compared with average raises for US wage earners of around 3-4% for salaried employees.

excerpted from Associated Press, by Marcy Gordon