As Democrats planned priority legislation for passage in their first 100 hours of leading the new Congress—including raising the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour—the Bush administration worked late into the night to produce a last-minute Christmas gift for CEOs.

Last year, corporate leaders fretted over SEC Chairman Christopher Cox’s new executive compensation disclosure rules. For the first time, starting in 2007, shareholders could see how much CEOs actually earned. Annual proxy statements would have to disclose CEO pay, instead of hiding it in footnotes and indecipherable language. 

Fretful and anxious over the SEC’s new rules, CEOs and their Washington, D.C., lobbyists like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce asked for—and got—an 11th-hour change: Instead of reporting the full value of CEO stock options, companies would only be required to disclose the “vested,” or exercisable, amount of stock options. So a $10 million stock options grant to a CEO would be reported as a $500,000 grant, if it wasn’t fully vested when the company’s proxy went out to shareholders. 

Meanwhile, another rash of CEO pay scandals saw more than 150 companies under Justice Department and SEC investigation in 2006 for backdating stock options, squeezing out millions of dollars for CEOs at the expense of shareholders.

The widening gap between the very rich and America’s working families was a major issue the 2006 election. The top one-tenth of 1 percent of the population, about 130,500 Americans, reported their average income was $4.9 million in 2004, while the bottom 60 percent of Americans made an average of $38,761. 

With the AFL-CIO leading the fight for full disclosure, AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Rich Trumka vowed to bring CEO pay into the daylight:What kind of country would protect CEOs who hide their pay, while they fight to block a minimum wage increase? Shareholders and working families deserve the truth—and a living wage!