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"The average construction worker at an energy company would have to work 4,279 years to equal what Greehey collected last year," the report noted.
Executive pay at U.S.-based oil companies also far outpaced pay at oil companies based outside the United States, says the report.
International oil giants BP and Royal Dutch Shell, the second and the third largest internationally, paid their top executives only one-eighth what their U.S. counterparts received -- 5.6 and 4.1 million dollars in 2005, respectively. Both companies operate in the same global marketplace as their U.S.-based competitors.
Since 1990, the overall CEO-worker pay gap in the United States has grown from 107-to-1 to last year's 411-to-1, said the report
The study came out a day after another U.S think-tank, the Phoenix Centre for Advanced Legal and Economic Public Policy Studies, issued a report defending oil industry profits by comparing the overall profitability of the U.S. oil firms to other industries.
It concluded that "selling beer or bleach is more profitable than selling gas and oil, even during times of 'record' profits for the oil companies."
The Phoenix Centre, which looks into broad public-policy issues and promotes a free-market approach, studied profits from companies like ExxonMobil, Chevron-Texaco, ConocoPhillips, Shell, Marathon, Hess and Sunoco.
"It may be fashionable to beat up on oil industry profits, but it appears that these firms do bear at least some of the burden of high oil prices," said George S. Ford, Phoenix Centre's chief economist and author of the study.
"Our analysis shows that when gas prices are at their highest, oil industry profitability is at its lowest," he said.
But the Phoenix Centre's position may be a lonely one in light of reports that BP, which operates some of the largest oil field in the United States, is under investigation by the Justice Department and the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission for possible manipulation of crude oil and gasoline markets.
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