How to Find Out if You're Underpaid at Work
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Your Money Briefing. Money and market stories from The Wall Street Journal. I'm J.R. Whalen in New York. Do you think you're underpaid for the job you do? There's a new Wall Street Journal interactive graphic to help you track salaries across hundreds of companies. More on that in a moment. First, these money items you should know.
How can I check if my salary is below the median at public companies?
The escalating trade tensions between Beijing and Washington have pulled America's farmers and agricultural exporters into the melee. China has announced tariffs on as much as 25% on American pork and eight other kinds of goods, as well as 15% tariffs on fruit and 120 types of commodities, which China said would apply to about $3 billion in products. China's tariffs are in retaliation for the 25% steel and 10% aluminum tariffs imposed by the Trump administration last month. And concerns over a U.S.-China trade war have driven the price of oil to a two-week low. Light Swede Crude for May fell 3% to $63.01 a barrel, its lowest close since March 19th. And empty space in the nation's regional shopping malls reached a six-year high in the first quarter.
The vacancy rate in big U.S. malls across 77 metropolitan areas increased to 8.4% in the first quarter. That's up from 8.3% in the fourth quarter and the highest since the fourth quarter of 2012. This is your Money Briefing from The Wall Street Journal. Welcome back, everybody. For the first time, publicly traded U.S. companies are revealing how much a typical employee makes, and you can easily see how your salary stacks up against your position at other companies in a new graphic in the Wall Street Journal. And Journal reporter Tao Francis joins us to take a look at the numbers. So, Tao, this is actually a requirement that companies release this information.
That's right. It's part of the Dodd-Frank financial regulatory overhaul that passed in the wake of the financial crisis. And it took a while for the Securities and Exchange Commission to implement it. But starting this spring, companies must disclose the total compensation for their median employee, as well as how that compares with its CEO.
And while this disclosed information sheds light on what the rank and file make, this is really aimed at revealing runaway CEO salaries. Isn't that kind of the main thing behind this?
I think there were a lot of ideas or intentions behind it, but certainly one of them was the idea that CEO pay has grown out of proportion to what ordinary Americans make. And this was at least in part, I think, by many of its supporters intended to highlight that.
And as we mentioned, the journal has an interactive chart that helps readers and our podcast listeners compare their salary against those at other companies. Can you just give me an idea of the scope of information that people can learn and how they can actually go about it when they go to the graphic?
Sure. Once you're at the graphic, you have several different options. It starts loaded with the salary at about $59,000 a year. So it'll compare all the companies that have disclosed this median pay number so far against whatever number you select. And again, it starts at $59,000, which is about the median household income in the U.S. So you can change that number. You can set it to your pay or what you'd like to be paid or what you think you ought to be paid. And you can also select which sectors of the economy are reflected. So these disclosures only come from publicly traded companies and only those that have disclosed the numbers so far. Several, over 100 have, I believe, but not everybody has yet.
For example, Apple has a fiscal year that ends in such a way that it won't have to disclose this number for about a year. But a lot of companies have. So you can compare how you stack up to the energy and utility industry or to the financial and real estate industries. And you can see where the median pay is for the sectors you select, how that compares to you. And then you can also see where individual companies are. You could search for an individual company or you can select some of the individual dots that are on the interactive to see where specific companies fall.
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