While workers’ wages barely budged, CEOs received a median 6 percent raise in 2002 on top of already outrageous pay packages, according to the AFL-CIO's Executive PayWatch website.

And while workers lost trillions in retirement savings, CEOs socked away incredibly lucrative retirement and severance payoffs. CEOs packed away pay and retirement rewards even though many of their companies lost stock value or even failed.

In 2002, according to PayWatch, a database of the compensation deals of CEOs at S&P Super 1,500 companies, CEOs received a total $8.5 million in median annual compensation.

In the past three years, shareholders—including workers who depend on the stock market for their retirement savings—collectively have lost $7 trillion as the high-tech boom ended and investors fled disgraced corporations.

Today, unemployment hovers at 6 percent, with the U.S. Department of Labor not even counting as unemployed the tens of thousands of jobless workers too discouraged to continue looking for work. And roughly 1 million unemployed workers who continue to job hunt have run through all their state and federal unemployment benefits.

Executive PayWatch also details the extraordinary retirement packages that, like excessive compensation, dilute shareholder value by eating into profits. HealthSouth CEO Richard Scrushy, fired earlier this year in the wake of a massive criminal accounting fraud investigation, receives a benefit program that includes lifetime health care, life insurance and personal travel arrangements, including use of company aircraft—all of which, according to his contract, he can keep, even though he was fired for cause.

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Visit the AFL-CIO Executive PayWatch site for details on corporate pay and campaign action tools.

Find out what it takes to build real retirement security.

Read about union shareholder proposals.

Find publications and other tools for pension fund fiduciaries.

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