Yesterday, ThinkProgress’ Tanya Somanader noted that Apple Inc. is breaking its profit record and sitting on nearly $100 billion in cash, while its Chinese laborers toil in unsafe and even deadly conditions. Here on the other side of the Atlantic, another huge company has decided to lock out its Canadian workers in an attempt to force them to accept pay cuts, even as it pulls in its own record profits:

Caterpillar reported a 36 per cent increase in after-tax profit for both the fourth quarter of 2011 and the full year 2011. Revenues for the year increased four per cent to $2.65 billion.

Despite the record profits, the company is pressuring its employees at the London [Ontario] locomotive plant to accept a pay cut from $32 per hour to $16.50. Caterpillar locked out the workers on Jan. 1 after union members rejected the pay cut.

While certainly not in the same league with Apple’s abuses, Caterpillar is just the latest company attempting to force workers to accept wage cuts at the same time its hauling in huge profits and paying its CEO millions. AT&T, Navistar, John Deere, and Wellpoint have all pulled the same trick in the last few years, laying off hundreds of workers. Caterpillar’s CEO, Doug Oberhelman, made $10.5 million in 2010.

“This is all about greed,” says Bob Scott, union chairman at the plant. “How are workers supposed to go back to earning wages last paid nearly 25 years ago, while the company is richer than ever?” CEOs today make about 343 times the amount earned by the typical worker.

Wall Street Pit’s Ron Haruni points out that as the banking industry’s stocks plunged this year — with major megabanks like Bank of America facing uncertain fates — their executives have walked away with sky-high salaries.

Haruni cites the work of Rochdale Securities analyst Dick Bove and shows how banks have seen their value and stocks plunge by double-digits while executive compensation remains high:

According to data from Rochdale Securities analyst Dick Bove, the heads of major banking groups including JPMorgan Chase (JPM), Goldman Sachs (GS) and Bank of America (BAC) are out-earning their employees and shareholders even as shares of bank stocks as a group lost about 26% this year.

Bove found that while the 23 financial institutions he follows saw their stock prices and market cap drop by more than 30% and 11%, respectively, bank CEO compensation averaged $7.74 million. That means the banking heads brought in 50 to 100 times the average worker. Take BofA’s CEO Brian Moynihan who will earn $2.26 million this year while his bank’s market value dropped 60% – the worst in Rochdale’s study.

Chase CEO Jamie Dimon will earn $41.9 this year — the most among the bank CEOs in Bove’s coverage list — for a bank that saw its stock lose roughly 23% this year. There’s also Goldman’s Lloyd Blankfein whose compensation was nearly $22 million, while the investment bank he runs – Wall Street’s most powerful — lost more than 46% of its market cap.

Haruni notes that press “reports have suggested that compensation pools at seven of the biggest U.S. banks will total about $156 billion (including salaries, benefits and bonuses) in 2011, which would be 3.7% higher than last year’s record breaking number.”

Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) is outraged that executives at the government-seized mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will receive a combined $12.8 million in bonuses after meeting only “modest goals.” He even held a press conference this week demanding the bonuses be undone. And last night, Barrasso told Fox News that it’s “absolutely wrong” and almost un-American for the bailed out firms to be handing out such large bonuses. Watch it:

Democratic lawmakers have been rightly upset by the bonuses as well, with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) saying yesterday that they induced his “gag reflex.” But while it’s welcome to see a Republican senator care about excessive executive compensation, especially at a bailed out firm, where was Barrasso when this happened back in 2009?

Back then, President Obama wanted to cap executive compensation at banks bailed out by taxpayers, but “Republicans hate[d] the idea.” “[I]s this still America? Do we really tell people how to run [a business], and who to pay and how much to pay?” Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) asked at the time. Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) explained, “I really don’t want the government to take over these businesses and start telling them everything about what they can do.”

Had Barrasso broken with his party at the time to take a stance similar to the one he is now espousing, he could have helped tip the political balance in favor of reigning in executive compensation at bailed out firms, whether they be banks or Fannie and Freddie.

Ongoing protests on Wall Street (which have inspired similar efforts around the country) are now in their third week, with no sign of slowing down. One of the issues galvanizing the protesters is the country’s growing income inequality, which is currently the worst its been since the Great Depression.

There are several factors driving this income inequality — including preferential treatment of investment income, weak estate taxes, and stagnant middle-class wages — but one of the problems is that executive pay has jumped by leaps and bounds, far outstripping the income made by workers. CEOs at America’s largest companies now earn 343 times more than the typical worker. In 1970, the average CEO earned 28 times as much as the typical worker. As the Washington Post noted today, this increase occurred at the same time that worker pay was actually falling, in inflation adjusted dollars:

The gap between what workers and top executives make helps explain why income inequality in the United States is reaching levels unseen since the Great Depression.

Since the 1970s, median pay for executives at the nation’s largest companies has more than quadrupled, even after adjusting for inflation, according to researchers. Over the same period, pay for a typical non-supervisory worker has dropped more than 10 percent, according to Bureau of Labor statistics.

And much of the increase was driven by nothing more than companies simply trying to ensure that their CEO’s pay was above the median for their industry, regardless of that CEO’s performance:

Companies have long hid the way they set executive pay, but in late 2006, the Securities and Exchange Commission began compelling companies to disclose the specifics of how they use peer groups to determine executive pay.

Since then, researchers have found that about 90 percent of major U.S. companies expressly set their executive pay targets at or above the median of their peer group. This creates just the kinds of circumstances that drive pay upward.

For those keeping score, the median CEO pay in 2010 was $9 million. For “top executives,” the median pay package comes in at about $4.9 million. This cuts across industries, while companies tend to target their pay within their respective industry, but it gives you a sense for the scale of the pay packages these companies are looking at when deciding what to pay their own people.

The nation’s biggest banks could be the poster children for this sort of corporate excess, as their CEOs received huge salaries and bonuses, even as their firms were blowing up themselves (and the global economy) on toxic mortgages. The Post noted that Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozillo “earned more than $180 million as he led the company to the brink of ruin during the five years before the housing bust. At times, his pay had been set at the 90th percentile of peers.” For those looking to address income inequality, it seems that reining in executive pay is a good place to start.

The United Auto Workers and General Motors are close to finalizing a new contract, following the first contract negotiations to take place between the two since GM was rescued by the Obama administration. But the UAW is still working on a deal with Ford, the only one of Detroit’s big three companies to turn down government aid.

Ford has had nine profitable quarters in a row, and paid its CEO, Alan Mulally, $26.5 million last year. But at the same time, it is fighting against giving its factory workers their fair share of the profits from the company’s success:

At The Rouge, Ford’s massive, 94-year-old factory complex in Dearborn, Mich., there’s talk along the assembly lines of winning back raises and bonuses lost when the company was near financial collapse in 2007. Workers, who assemble F-150 pickup trucks at the site, are upset that Ford is trying to cut labor costs, especially after nine straight profitable quarters and a $26.5 million pay package for CEO Alan Mulally.

When the company was going to fail, the workers “gave up cost-of-living pay raises, performance bonuses and other benefits.” Last year, Ford reinstated merit pay and some bonuses to the company’s salaried, white-collar workers, but has yet to do so for its hourly-wage factory workers.

“We have the big honchos taking multimillion-dollar bonuses and they can’t even give us back” concessions, said Joe Pack, 50, who works at Michigan Assembly in Wayne, Michigan. “Ford has to do a lot more,” agreed Gary Walkowicz, who works at Ford’s Dearborn, Michigan plant.

In 2010, CEO pay across the corporate world went up 27 percent, while worker pay went up just 2 percent. Ford’s continued profitability would not have been possible without its workforce, and the company should be sure to recognize that fact during contract negotiations.

Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein

Wall Street is planning to lay off thousands of workers in a supposedly underperforming quarter, and Goldman Sachs is no exception, saying that it plans to cut $1.2 billion in costs by laying off 1,000 people, roughly 3 percent of its workforce. The mega-bank is also going after small savings by downsizing its drinking cups.

Even plants aren’t safe from the bank’s tightened budget. The London office removed potted plants, reportedly causing “disquiet” among employees and led “to a stand-off between the plant pickers and staff.” Morgan Stanley has also cut back on office foliage, while Bank of America skipped an annual field day.

However, the real measure of whether Wall Street is serious about cutting costs will be if bonuses go down during lean times. And so far, the chances do not look good. The New York Times’ Dealbook reports that banks, including Goldman, have set aside $65.69 billion for bonuses at the end year, an 8 percent increase over last year:

Wall Street executives are also preparing their staffs for smaller year-end bonuses, although the change is not yet reflected in the expenses. During the first six months of the year Citigroup, JPMorgan, Goldman, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America set aside $65.69 billion to cover compensation and benefits, up 8 percent from a year ago, according to data provided by Nomura. But financial firms tend to wait until the fourth quarter to make the call on the annual payouts.

Unless Goldman and other banks follow up a tough season by handing out smaller bonuses later this year, its cost-saving initaitves are only superficial. A group of shareholders challenged the Goldman board of directors for showing “scant regard” for their interests, having handed out billions in bonuses the same year it received federal aid. Goldman won a dismissal of the case yesterday.

The bonuses may have been a part of “God’s work,” which Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein claimed to be doing in 2009, but if Goldman practiced the same austerity toward bonuses that it did toward office plants, it could afford to keep both its employees and its 12 ounce cups.

– Rebecca Leber

Last year, as Americans across the country grappled with the widespread effects of the Great Recession, tax dodging by corporations and the wealthy cost the average U.S. taxpayer $434, even as corporate profits soared 81 percent. In fact, according to a new report from the Institute for Policy Studies, “corporate tax dodging has gone so out of control that 25 major U.S. corporations last year paid their chief executives more than they paid Uncle Sam in federal income taxes”:

– Of last year’s 100 highest-paid corporate chief executives in the United States, 25 took home more in CEO pay than their company paid in 2010 federal income taxes.

– These 25 CEOs averaged $16.7 million, well above last year’s $10.8 million average for S&P 500 CEOs. Most of the companies they ran actually came out ahead at tax time, collecting tax refunds from the IRS that averaged $304 million.

– CEOs in 22 of these 25 firms enjoyed pay increases in 2010. In 13 of these companies, CEO paychecks ratcheted up while the corporate income tax bill either declined or the size of the corporate tax refund expanded.

Included amongst the 25 are well-known corporate behemoths like General Electric, Boeing, Verizon, and Ebay. Prudential CEO John Strangfeld, in one example, made $16.2 million last year while his company reaped a $722 million tax refund. Bank of New York Mellon CEO Robert Kelly received $19.4 million, after his bank got a $670 million tax refund.

Eighteen of the 25 companies that the IPS studied operated subsidiaries in offshore tax havens. In fact, “the firms, all combined, had 556 tax haven subsidiaries last year,” including 128 for just one company (the reinsurance corporation Aon).

Currently, corporate taxes have plunged to historic lows, with many of America’s largest companies literally paying no federal income taxes. Meanwhile, according to researchers at Northeastern University, corporate profits accounted for 88 percent of real national income growth since 2009, while wages and salaries made up less than 1 percent. In 2010, executive pay grew by 27 percent while wages grew by only 2 percent.

The IPS also found that “of the 25 companies that paid their CEO more than Uncle Sam, 20 also spent more on lobbying lawmakers than they paid in corporate taxes. Eighteen gave more to the political campaigns of their favorite candidates than they paid to the IRS in taxes.”