According to the AFL-CIO Executive Pay Watch charts, the average CEO of an Illinois corporation makes 289 times more than the average Illinois worker.  

The average Illinois worker makes $46,338 annually.  The average Illinois CEO makes $13 million-plus annually.  

Looking at minimum age workers, the average is 780 times more for the CEO than the person cleaning hotels or flipping burgers.

According to the S&P (Standard & Poors) index, the ten highest paid CEOs in Illinois are:

Sandeep Mathrani, General Growth Properties; $39M+;  
Richard Gonzalez, AbbVie, $20M+; 
Irene Rosenfeld, Mondelez International (Nabisco), $19M+; 
Miles White, Abbott Laboratories, $19M+; 
Samuel Allen, Deere & Co., $18M+; 
Robert Parkinson, Jr., Baxter International, $17M+; 
Douglas Oberhelman, Caterpillar, $17M+; 
Gregory Wasson, Walgreens, $16M+; 
Christopher Crane, Exelon, $15M+; and, 
E. Scott Santi, Illinois Tool Works, $14M+.

None of the Illinois CEOs show up in the top fifty highest paid; leading the pack nationally is Joseph Kiani of the Masimo Group at $119M+.

Illinois workers also faired better than the national average.  The average CEO in the nation made 335 times the average worker.  The national average workers’ salary was computed as $36,875.

Nevada led the nation with the widest gap between its CEO and its average workers, at CEO pay 539 times the average worker.

Even with these salaries, it doesn’t always mean that corporations are paying their fair share of taxes.

Legally, the corporate tax rate is 35 percent; during this election season, you’ll hear many candidates complaining it’s too high and a detriment to business.

Yet according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, corporations are actually paying at a rate of 10.6 percent of their profits.  

“Americans are rightly angered by CEOs who haven’t learned their lesson,” said AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. “After driving the economy into the ground and gambling with the nation’s retirement savings, these same corporations are giving out huge bonuses for bad behavior.”

You can learn more at the AFL-CIO’s Executive Pay Watch site: http://http://www.aflcio.org/Corporate-Watch/Paywatch-2016