Some big U.S. companies, it seemed, have been giving generous raises. In a regulatory filing last year, the equipment manufacturer Caterpillar reported that median pay increased 12 percent over the prior year. It rose by 17 percent at Kellogg’s, the cereal-maker; by 10 percent at Procter & Gamble; and by 26 percent at Conagra.

Those official pay figures were not what they appeared, however. While Congress passed a law in 2010 requiring companies to report median pay, federal regulators adopted a corporate lobbyist’s proposal that allows firms to make a “shortcut” calculation that can render the figures meaningless.

What hundreds of companies have been reporting as “median pay” is not actual median pay, but the pay of a single worker who was at the median a year or two ago. Read Full Article - The Washington Post, March 20, 2020