The gap between CEO pay and average worker pay has gotten outrageous. Luckily, you don't need to wait for Congress to take meaningful action to change that.

A new Institute for Policy Studies analysis of 300 low-wage corporations finds that the gaps between CEO and typical worker pay at these firms increased from 604 to 1 in 2020 to a staggering 670 to 1 in 2021.

What’s even more disturbing? Forty percent of these firms are federal contractors, meaning that ordinary taxpayers are actually enabling these extreme pay gaps.

The report points to the example of Maximus, a company that services student loans and operates Obamacare and Medicare call centers for Uncle Sam. CEO Bruce Caswell collected $7.9 million in 2021 — 208 times the firm’s median paycheck. And now Maximus is facing walkouts by employees demanding decent pay and benefits.

Extreme pay gaps are bad for business because they lower employee morale and productivity and boost turnover rates. They also widen gender and racial disparities. Women and people of color make up a disproportionately large share of today’s low-wage workers and a tiny share of corporate leaders. In 2021, less than 1 percent of Fortune 500 corporations employed Black CEOs, and just 8 percent of these firms had women at their helm.

A recent poll shows that 87% of Americans view the growing gap between CEO and worker pay as a problem for the nation. Working families shouldn’t have to enable these obscene pay gaps through taxpayer-funded contracts.

Please, use your power to crack down on this problem by making it hard for companies with huge pay gaps to get lucrative contracts from Uncle Sam.