The last increase in the federal minimum wage was passed into law four years ago today, but the current minimum wage falls far short of meeting the needs of the average worker. To match the buying power of the 1968 minimum wage, for instance, today’s would need to be increased to $10.55 an hour.

And yet, more than a quarter of America’s private sector workers make less than $10 an hour, according to a report released this month by the National Employment Law Project:

In 2011, more than one in four private sector jobs (26 percent) were low‐wage positions paying less than $10 per hour. These jobs, moreover, were concentrated in industries where low‐wage workers make up a substantial share – in some cases more than half – of the entire workforce.

Worse yet, the share of low-wage jobs is increasing, as five industries that are comprised primarily of low-wage workers have grown faster than total employment since the end of the Great Recession, as this NELP chart shows:

While the share of low-wage jobs continues to rise, so to do the profits of the corporations that utilize low-wage workers. Two-thirds of America’s low-wage workers are employed by corporations with more than 100 employees, and the nation’s biggest low-wage employers are faring well since the end of the recession. 92 percent were profitable last year, and 63 percent are more profitable than they were before the recession, according to the report.

And even as they employ low-wage workers, chief executives continue to rake in massive salaries, as AlterNet’s Sarah Jaffe notes. At the 50 companies that employ the largest number of low-wage workers, CEOs made an average of $9.4 million — roughly 450 times more than the gross income of a full-time worker who makes $10 an hour.

Hours after new Duke Energy CEO Bill Johnson assumed his new position following the Duke/Progress Energy merger this week, he resigned his post. But Johnson can still qualify for up to $44.4 million for his time and effort:

Despite his short-lived tenure, Mr. Johnson will receive exit payments worth as much as $44.4 million, according to Duke. That includes $7.4 million in severance, a nearly $1.4 million cash bonus, a special lump-sum payment worth up to $1.5 million and accelerated vesting of his stock awards, according to a Duke regulatory filing Tuesday night. Mr. Johnson gets the lump-sum payment as long as he cooperates with Duke and doesn’t disparage his former employer, the filing said.

Under his exit package, Mr. Johnson also will receive approximately $30,000 to reimburse him for relocation expenses.

The Duke board voted for Johnson’s resignation, and since Johnson was eligible for severance if he quit for “good reason,” he is able to collect his $44 million. Grist calculates that Johnson’s pay package comes out to $5.5 million per hour, if he actually put in a full 8-hour day.

Johnson’s golden parachute after his one day of work is emblematic of the disconnect between worker pay and CEO pay that has occurred over the last few decades. Average CEO pay is now 380 times the pay of the average worker, and CEO pay has grown 127 times faster than worker pay over the last 30 years.

Big companies and interest groups that represent them are resisting a piece of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act that is meant to help rein in executive compensation, even as pay for chief executives skyrockets and is increasingly untethered from company performance.

The rule, a draft of which is set to be issued at the end of the month, would force companies to disclose the gap between the pay of their CEOs and average employees. Over the last 30 years, CEO pay has grown 127 times faster than worker pay, and the average CEO at America’s largest companies now makes $14.5 million. CEO pay grew twice as fast as workers’ wages in 2011 alone.

Despite those alarming disparities, business groups and companies are lining up to oppose the rule, saying calculating such a disparity would be too hard and “would make them easy targets for CEO-pay critics,” the Wall Street Journal reports:

Companies say they have a rough sense of their internal pay ratios, but they argue that their global workforces and varied payroll systems make calculating the median cumbersome, if not virtually impossible. What’s more, they say, disclosing pay ratios would make them easy targets for CEO-pay critics.

“The ratio is not going to be a meaningful way to help investors but will be used as a political tool to attack companies,” says David Hirschmann, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Center for Capital Markets, which opposes the measure.

But other companies that tie executive pay to the pay of average workers have pushed back on the criticism. Mark Ehrnstein, a vice president at Whole Foods, told the Wall Street Journal that tracking pay “takes a few days” and isn’t as cumbersome as business groups allege. Whole Foods tracks pay to ensure that no employee makes more than 19 times the median company salary. By comparison, the average American CEO now makes 380 times more than the average worker.

According to an analysis by the pay research group Equilar, compensation for top bank CEOs grew by nearly 12 percent last year. The Financial Times noted that these increases occurred “despite widespread falls in profits and share prices“:

Top US and European bankers, including JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon and Citigroup’s Vikram Pandit, have enjoyed double-digit annual pay rises averaging almost 12 per cent, despite widespread falls in profits and share prices, Financial Times research shows. [...]

The analysis of total pay awarded to 15 bank chiefs by Equilar, a US pay research group, shows they received an average 11.9 per cent pay rise last year to $12.8m, the second increase in a row. However, the pace of growth has slowed.

Bankers such as Brian Moynihan at Bank of America, Citigroup’s Mr Pandit and JPMorgan’s Mr Dimon enjoyed the largest gains.

According to a different estimate by Bloomberg News, Wall Street CEO pay grew by 20 percent last year. At the same time, worker wages grew by only 2.1 percent. And inflation adjusted wages actually declined by 0.6 percent between March 2011 and March 2012.

At the moment, in fact, wages as a percentage of the economy are near all-time lows:

Over the last 30 years, CEO pay has increased 127 times faster than worker pay.

Pay for chief executives has skyrocketed over the last two decades, and a new study found that the way executives use their wealth has a direct impact on how their companies operate. “Unfrugal” CEOs — those who spend their massive salaries on luxury goods — aren’t more likely to commit fraud in their personal business dealings. Their companies, however, are more likely to commit fraud, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research:

However, as predicted, we find that unfrugal CEOs oversee a relatively loose control environment characterized by relatively high probabilities of other insiders perpetrating fraud and unintentional material reporting errors. Further, cultural changes associated with an increase in fraud risk are more likely during unfrugal (vs. frugal) CEOs’ reign, including the appointment of an unfrugal CFO, an increase in executives’ equity-based incentives to misreport, and a decline in measures of board monitoring intensity.

The study also found that companies run by free-spending CEOs are “significantly more likely” to make bad business decisions that lead to bankruptcy. But this shouldn’t be shocking: at some of America’s biggest companies, executive compensation is barely tied to the performance of the business.

America’s largest wireless service provider plans to cut 1,700 jobs by offering its technicians and call center employees buyouts. Verizon Communications announced last week that it would reduce its nationwide workforce by 1 percent, and if enough workers don’t accept the buyouts, it will resort to involuntary layoffs.

Verizon paid chief executive Lowell C. McAdam more than $22.5 million in 2011, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of executive compensation. The company has paid its top five executives more than $350 million in the last five years, according to the Communications Workers of America, the union that deals most directly with Verizon:

More than half of McAdam’s compensation package came from “Performance Awards,” according to the WSJ analysis. In 2011, the company’s shareholders saw an 18.8 percent increase in the value of their returns. Workers, however, have not shared in those gains. Verizon eliminated 26,000 jobs over a two-year period in 2008 and 2009 — including 16,000 jobs in 2009 alone — and laid off roughly 13,000 more in 2010.

At the same time, Verizon has demanded sizable concessions from workers in its negotiations with unions, asking for the elimination of the company’s pension plan, increases in health care premiums, and extra leeway to outsource jobs, according to a release from the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

Workers at an Illinois plant for the mega manufacturer Caterpillar have been on strike for a month after rejecting a concession-heavy contract proposed by the company. Yesterday, workers overwhelmingly rejected a second Caterpillar offer, by a vote of 504-116.

According to union officials, the contract “provided no raises, eliminated the defined benefits pension program, weakened seniority rights and required machinists to pay higher contributions for health care.” All of this, at a time when the company is making record profits. In fact, Fortune Magazine recently said the company is “crushing it” when it comes to profitability.

At the same time that it is refusing to give its workers a fair raise, the company saw fit to increase its CEOs pay by 60 percent:

The annual compensation of Caterpillar Inc.’s chairman and chief executive rose 60 percent in 2011, as the company posted a record revenue of $60.1 billion.

Douglas Oberhelman earned $16.9 million in 2011, a figure that includes salary, bonuses, stock and option awards and retirement plan contributions. Oberhelman pay increase, which was tied to the company’s performance, included a $4.9 million cash payment, an 81 percent increase from his 2010 cash award. His base salary increased to $1.4 million from $1.1 million in 2010.

“The practice of raising executive compensation to obscene levels while making it harder for working families to pay for basic medical expenses is impossible to justify at a company as successful as Caterpillar,” said International Association of Machinists President Tom Buffenbarger.

The typical American worker would have to work 244 years in order to earn what the average CEO makes in just one year. Over the last 30 years, CEO pay has increased 127 times faster than worker pay.