The analysis from Oxfam and the International Trade Union Confederation, released ahead of International Workers' Day, gives a number that's hard to translate into a metaphor: the salaries of the chief executives of the world's largest corporations are growing twenty times faster than the salaries of workers in those same companies.

In real terms, executives saw a real pay increase of 11% last year. The real wage of the worker - 0.5%. Which means that for every real denar of improvement the worker gets, the CEO gets 20 such denars. In the same period. In the same company.

The study covers 1,500 corporations across 33 countries that disclosed executive compensation for 2025. The average CEO - 8.4 million dollars a year. The average worker on the planet, to earn the same sum, would need about 490 years of work. Not four. Not forty. Four hundred and ninety.

And then there are the more extreme cases. Four corporations - including Blackstone, Broadcom and Goldman Sachs - reported paying their chief executives over 100 million dollars in 2025. The ten best-paid CEOs together earned over a billion dollars.

On the ownership side: roughly 1,000 identified billionaires received 79 billion dollars in dividends in 2025. That's 2,500 dollars per second. Bernard Arnault (LVMH) - 3.8 billion. Amancio Ortega (Inditex/Zara) - 3.7 billion.

The CEO of Oxfam says what all their studies have been saying for years now: governments have to cap executive pay, tax the super-rich fairly, and make sure minimum wages at least keep up with inflation.

In the Balkans this isn't news, but the figure still shocks. Do we remember a single company here that kept its workers when the crisis hit, while the executives kept their bonuses? The global trend is the same, just with more zeros. The question is simple: what creates this? And why is nobody stopping it?