Imagine you work on the floor of a Coca-Cola bottling facility. You show up every day, you do the work, and last year you took home around $17,947. Now imagine learning that your company's chief executive — James Quincey — earned compensation worth roughly $31.2 million in the same twelve months.
That's not a typo. It's a pay ratio of approximately 1,739 to one.
To put it another way: Quincey earned in a single working day what the median Coca-Cola employee earned in nearly five years.
These numbers come from a new analysis by the ITUC and Oxfam, which examined pay data across 1,500 major corporations and found that chief executives enjoyed an 11% real-terms pay increase in 2025 — meaning their pay grew after accounting for inflation — while the average global worker saw wages rise by just 0.5%. CEOs, in other words, got richer roughly 20 times faster than the people working for them.
Coca-Cola isn't alone. At TJX — the parent company of T.J. Maxx and Marshalls — the ratio reached 1,774 to one. These are not outliers anymore. They are the story.
But here's what the headlines usually miss: the damage these numbers do isn't primarily to workers' bank accounts. It's to something harder to measure and far more expensive to lose — the sense, deep in the gut of every person on the payroll, that they actually matter to the organisation they've given their time to.
