Executive Paywatch: A New Site Featuring A CEO Compensation Database and Comparison Tools

Earlier today the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, better known as the AFL-CIO, the U.S.’s largest federation of labor unions, launched a new website: Executive Paywatch.

The site focuses on the Dodd-Frank Act’s say-on-pay provisions with a particular emphasis on Section 953, which directs the Securities and Exchange Commission to adopt rules requiring disclosure of the:

• median annual compensation of all of a company’s employees, except for its chief executive officer;

• total annual compensation of the chief executive officer; and

• ratio of the median annual compensation of all employees to the total annual compensation of the chief executive officer.

Based on the current Dodd-Frank implementation schedule, the Commission should be proposing rules to address Section 953 some time between August and December 2011 but, as Broc Romanek notes over at The Corporate Counsel, there’s no deadline for implementing Section 953 and the release of proposed rules has already been pushed back once.

Executive Paywatch features a database that includes compensation information for the chief executives of Russell 3,000 companies.

It also includes comparisons of CEO compensation to minimum wage workers, median workers and President Obama, and even allows you to fill out a form to compare your own compensation package (trust me, it’s a pitiful sight, even if you are very well paid).

Executive Paywatch also compares the compensation of chief executives from 299 of the S&P 500’s largest companies, as disclosed in the companies’ most recent proxy materials and compiled by salary.com, with the median salary of workers like nurses, teachers and fire fighters as disclosed in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Employment Statistics estimates.

Source: AFL-CIO analysis of pay data from 299 companies, provided by salary.com

Even though all of this information is publicly available, it’s still utterly jaw dropping when laid out like this.