As an impending war on workers’ wages gathers steam, there’s comparatively little talk about the gargantuan pay packets of corporate executives. That’s too bad, because a new report suggests those pay packets have ballooned to new, ever-higher levels even as worker pay has stagnated.

The report from the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) is the latest of the organization’s annual series of Executive Excess reports, this time examining CEO pay at three hundred publicly held US corporations that recorded the lowest median wages in 2020. What the IPS found is as depressing as it is unsurprising: the already massive CEO-worker pay chasm only widened over the course of 2021, and worker pay at many of the companies has fallen behind inflation, even as corporate profits have been turned into millions of dollars more for individual executives.

According to the report, CEO pay at these low-paying firms rose by 31 percent to an average of $10.6 million, pushing the average ratio of CEO-to-median-worker salary to 670-to-1, up markedly from 2020’s gap of 604-to-1. Forty-nine of the firms even recorded pay gaps of an astounding 1,000-to-1.