Are meager unemployment benefits too generous? Is a weekly stipend of $300 causing some unemployed workers to stay at home? Is it time for Congress to crack down on scroungers who may be gaming the system because they would rather subsist on $1,200 a month than expose themselves to a deadly virus by staffing a deep fryer for pennies an hour?

As questions like these preoccupy many of the country’s leading lawmakers, newly compiled research underscores the extent to which America’s CEOs have enjoyed a year of plenty as essential workers face high infection rates, high unemployment, and faltering wages. The analysis, published earlier this week by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), reveals that more than half of the hundred largest low-wage employers gave chief executives pay rises averaging 29 percent while frontline workers earned 2 percent less. Not only that, but many firms actively rewrote their own compensation plans so that executives would receive inflated pay during the pandemic.

As the report points out, more than five hundred publicly-traded companies trumpeted cuts to the base salaries of their CEOs in 2020, often to great media acclaim. Performative gestures like these, however, obscure the fact that base salary generally makes up only a small percentage of executive compensation. With rules and performance benchmarks often rigged to bloat bonuses, the result has ultimately been record pay for CEOs at a time when worker pay is stagnating and workers themselves are at unique risk of infection.