Corporations will no longer be able to hide how much CEOs are paid compared to the workers who make those companies run, under a rule proposed today by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The rule requires companies to disclose the ratio of total compensation between chief executive officers and the median pay of employees.

That new rule does far more than help point out the historic and growing massive gap between CEO and worker pay. It is an important tool for investors to judge a company’s internal compensation structure, says AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka.

In case you missed it, The New York Times published two articles last weekend that captured the dramatic disparity between workers’ wages and executive pay at large corporations across the country. While median working family incomes fell last year, median CEO and executive compensation skyrocketed and lucrative executive retirement packages continued to expand. These lucrative plans, known as “Golden Parachutes,” have increased despite years of public outcry as companies have chipped away at workers’ pensions and retirement plans. At the same time, a coalition of CEOs and corporations are advocating cuts to earned Social Security and Medicare benefits as they rake in lavish retirement and bonus packages.

A new Bloomberg article notes that the CEOs of the Standard and Poor's 500 corporations make 204 times as much money as their own employees. The article highlights the most extreme disparity in the S&P 500, where former J.C. Penney CEO Ron Johnson received a total compensation package 1,795 times that of former fashion jewelry saleswoman Rebecca Gonzales in 2011.

Did you know that the CEOs of the Campaign to Fix the Debt, the corporate front group that wants to cut Social Security and Medicare and lower corporate taxes, have parked more than $418 billion of untaxed corporate profits overseas? Overall it is estimated that U.S. corporations have as much as $1.9 trillion sheltered overseas. That would make a nice down payment on fixing the debt.

You can read about "Fix the Debt" and more in the 2013 edition of the AFL-CIO’s Executive PayWatch launched today. PayWatch not only shines a light on Fix the Debt hypocrisy, but it also explores the huge wage gap between CEO pay and the average U.S. worker. PayWatch started in 1997. 

Visit www.paywatch.org.

Next time you write your tax check to the Internal Revenue Service, imagine which multibillion-dollar corporation may get some of your hard-earned pay.

How about drugmaker Abbott Laboratories, which in 2011 claimed a $586 million tax refund for its 64 subsidiaries operating in 16 countries considered tax havens?

Or maybe Chesapeake Energy, a company that last year made $2.8 billion in pre-tax U.S. profits—but whose effective tax rate over the course of its 23-year history has averaged only about 1 percent?

This is a cross-post from Huffington Post by Stan Sorscher, labor representative for the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace/IFPTE Local 2001 (SPEEA/IFPTE).

A CEO, a Tea Party member and public employee sit at a table with 12 cookies on a plate. The CEO grabs 11 cookies and tells the Tea Party member, "You better watch him. He wants your cookie."

The CEO took 11 out of 12 cookies. This isn't a question of what's fair. The CEO has the economic power to take 11 cookies—and he does.

Citing our 2012 Executive PayWatch website—CEO Pay and the 99%—the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, in an editorial today, says:

Income inequality is spawning deep divisions in America, and this is one problem that starts at the top. 

Check it out: ABC News has a nice take on our just-released data on CEO pay.

Click here to take a look at the slide show of CEO images and their pay--an America's Most Wanted lineup from Wall Street to Silicon Valley.

On the eve of tomorrow’s unemployment report for April, we get this news from Fortune:

Profits of the 500 largest U.S. corporations soar by 81 percent ($318 billion), the third largest percentage gain in list history…Wal-Mart holds the number one spot for the second year in a row…Exxon Mobil leads profits with $30 billion, for the eighth year in row.