In 2007, the average ceo of a fortune 500 company was paid ____

Photograph by Getty Images/Ikon Images

This week I got called a bully.

What provoked the name-calling was a Securities and Exchange Commission vote on Wednesday to adopt regulations requiring corporations to disclose the gap between what they pay their CEO and their workers. The commissioners voted 3 to 2 along straight party lines.

In a dissenting statement, SEC Republican Commissioner Michael Piwowar said his colleagues were “acquiescing to bullies.”

If supporting CEO-worker pay ratio disclosure makes you a bully, then count me among them. For many years, I’ve argued that extreme inequality within firms, with big company CEOs making hundreds of times more than shop floor employees, is not just grossly unfair. It’s also bad for business.

A Stanford University review of several studies, for instance, found that highly differentiated pay between top and bottom earners tends to reduce employee morale and job satisfaction. A CtW Investment Group analysis of S&P 500 companies indicated that those with high estimated CEO-worker pay ratios had lower shareholder returns over a five-year period than companies with low CEO-pay ratios.

In 2010, the Dodd-Frank financial reform made CEO-worker pay ratio disclosure the law of the land. But for five years, in the face of intense opposition, SEC officials have dragged their feet on implementation.

Corporate lobby groups and allied lawmakers have been bent on blocking or gutting the rule. And there were times, I must admit, when I responded to their attacks in a less than kindly manner.

Last year, for example, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce published a study claiming large companies would be forced to shell out an average of $311,800 and crunch numbers for 1,825 hours to calculate their median worker pay. I couldn’t resist penning a phony help wanted ad for “slow and expensive accountants.” How else could these companies back up such absurd numbers?

Of course I’m not the only big meanie. The SEC received more than 287,400 public comment letters on this issue, an overwhelming majority of which were supportive.

At the end of his dissenting statement, Commissioner Piwowar reminded us of schoolyard lessons about bullies. “Acquiescing,” he said, “only gives them more ammunition.”

Here he does have a point. Those of us who’ve advocated for CEO-worker pay disclosure will indeed be using this victory to push for more. Specifically, this new federal rule will help us promote state-level initiatives to add extra oomph to disclosure by tapping the power of the public purse.

A Rhode Island state senate bill, for example, would give preferential treatment in the awarding of government contracts to firms that have gaps between CEO and median worker pay of no more than 25 to 1. This benchmark was inspired by Peter Drucker, known as the Father of Management Science, who believed the ratio of pay between worker and executive can run no higher than 20-to-1 without damaging company morale and productivity.

[fortune-brightcove videoid=4165615317001]

Under this legislation, companies competing for state contracts could improve their chances by reducing their pay gaps — either by lowering executive compensation or lifting up wages at the bottom of their pay scale. Either way, Rhode Island taxpayers would get a bigger bang for their buck, since narrower wage divides are likely to boost productivity. Tax policy could also reward companies with more equitable pay practices by offering lower rates for narrower gaps.

Those who imagine themselves to be the victims of all this so-called bullying on pay gaps are not just running home to mommy. Within hours of the SEC vote, House Financial Services Committee Chair Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) announced plans for a vote on a bill to repeal this section of Dodd-Frank. Similar legislation has been introduced in the Senate.

Overpaid CEOs, it seems, are still turning to their big brothers in Congress to try to scare off the big bad bullies. But in dragging out this fight, the corporate chiefs are the ones who will be left with the black eyes.

Sarah Anderson directs the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies.

In between 1978 and 2014, inflation-adjusted CEO pay increased by almost 1,000%, according to a report released on Sunday by the Economic Policy Institute. Meanwhile, typical workers in the U.S. saw a pay raise of just 11% during that same period.

With these increases in mind, it should come as no surprise that the ratio between average American CEO pay and worker pay is now 303-to-1. This ratio is lower than its peak in 2000, when it was 376-to-1, but it’s in excess of the 1965 ratio of 20-to 1.

Average realized pay for CEOs at the top 350 firms as measured by revenue was up 3.9% between 2013 and 2014, and up by 54.3% since the recovery began in 2009. Meanwhile, most other workers have faced stagnant wages.

But pay increases and ratios only tell part of the story. The stark differences are made concrete when translated into dollars and cents. In 1965, CEOs earned an average of $832,000 annually compared to $40,200 for workers. In 2014, CEO pay had risen to an average of $16,316,000 compared to only $53,200 for workers.

EPI’s report finds that CEO pay rises and falls along with the stock market—it peaked in 2000, dropped due to the financial crisis and increased during the market’s recovery. Such broad market fluctuations may not have anything to do with how well an individual CEO is performing. Instead most CEOs receive pay in in the form of stock, and so they are able to cash in at the most beneficial times.

In economic parlance, this power of CEOs is described as “rents.” Being a CEO gives you the power to extract concessions from corporate boards, and so CEO pay rises in excess of any real increase in performance.

Lawrence Mishel, an economist and president of the EPI, said, “The escalation in CEO pay was not accompanied by a corresponding increase in output. They didn’t make the pie bigger but they are taking a bigger piece of it. What that means is that everyone else has a smaller piece.”

Defenders of CEO pay claim that this kind of pay data shows that all highly skilled and highly paid workers have benefited and that talented people are being rewarded appropriately. But, again, the EPI’s report shows that CEO pay is six times that of the top 0.1% of earners.

These same defenders of CEO pay also claim that if CEO pay were reduced, there would be an exodus of CEOs from publicly traded companies to privately traded ones. At the same time, it’s unclear if all of these handsomely rewarded CEOs are as irreplaceable as we may think. The EPI was explicit in its conclusion that the CEO pay raises were “not by virtue of their [the CEOs] contribution to economic output but by virtue of their position.”

EPI also proposes that increasing taxes for the highest earners might even put a cap on CEOs’ power play for higher compensation. It also proposes removing tax breaks for certain kinds of pay, like stock options, which have propelled most of the growth in CEO pay.

But aren’t these CEOs the cream of the crop? After all, movie stars earn more than provincial actors, sports stars earn more than college football players.

“The key here,” Mishel said, “is that if you look at the household heads of the top 1% of income earners, 40% of them are executives, and that does not even including any executives from finance,” such as Wall St, the hedge fund industry. “That’s another 20%.”

“It’s actually a lot of people,” he added, “two-thirds of the top 1%, while there are very few sports stars and movie stars.”

Although it is clear that a lot of people do care, very much, about CEO pay, why should shareholders—a CEO’s employers, so to speak—care about income disparity? Does it affect performance?

“Being mindful of the income gap,” said Mishel, “reflects a certain mindset in a corporation. It reflects the way a board and a compensation committee is making decisions. Not only that, those gaps are important to the people who work at those corporations who have to get out of bed and go to work in the morning to do a good job.”

Employees witnessing a growing disparity between their pay and that of the CEO may not be as willing to put in extra effort. Such pay gaps do not make it easy for managers to reveal the bad news that there will be no pay bump again this year.

And a corporate board that’s aware of these potentially detrimental effects to employee morale is likely doing a better job setting the kind of strategies that will increase a company’s value to shareholders.

While it’s no surprise that CEOs make a lot of money, the actual pay gap between top chiefs and rest of America’s biggest earners is startling: The average CEO at one of the 350 largest companies takes home more than five times the annual earnings of the average 0.1 percenter.

According to a new report on CEO pay from the Economic Policy Institute, chief executives at those 350 companies made $15.6 million on average in 2016—271 times what the typical worker earns.

Though CEO compensation has fallen slightly in the past few years, it has increased by more than 930% since 1978. CEO pay has grown faster than the stock market or the wages of the top 0.1 percent.

This increase in compensation is even more staggering when you consider that the top 1% earned 87 times more than the bottom 50% of workers in 2016, up from a 27-to-1 ratio in 1980.

The EPI report notes that chief executive pay has risen faster than profits or the wages of college graduates over the last several decades, indicating that chief executives are earning more due to their power to set pay.

Higher taxes on top earners or increased corporate tax rates for firms with very high CEO-to-worker compensation ratios could rein in executive pay without adversely affecting workers or the economy, the report suggests.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s CEO pay rule, which would require public companies to disclose the ratio of the median annual compensation of all employees to the annual total of the chief executive officer, is one recent measure designed to keep the compensation ratio in check, but the future of the controversial disclosure rule is uncertain.

The SEC opened up comments on the rule in February and on Monday Commissioner Michael Piwowar criticized it during a discussion at The Heritage Foundation.

“You see more and more special interests trying to turn the SEC into a social justice agency rather than having us be an agency which, as our statutory mandate, provides investors with material information,” he said.