The Hanesbrands NOligarchy Profile
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Hanesbrands earned a NOligarchy Score of 68.51 out of 100 — a number that, in this grading system, means the lower, the worse. The closer to zero, the more the company’s choices tilt toward concentrated power and away from workers and the public. At 68.51, Hanesbrands sits above the midpoint of the scale, but its score is pulled downward most sharply by a CEO pay gap that defies ordinary comprehension.
Current Pillar Scores
Political Access
64.8
Wealth Extraction
50.6
Playing by the Rules
100.0
Score history — 23 quarters
Tier bands show where each quarter's score falls — no numeric y-axis needed. The dashed ring marks the year-over-year comparison point. Tap any quarter but the first to see its pillar breakdown.
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Political Access Grade: 63.97/100. Hanesbrands chose to spend $180,000 on federal lobbying from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026 (8 quarters — the two-year tracking period), channeling every dollar through a single outside firm and directing every filing at a single issue: trade. No Political Action Committee (PAC) contributions were made.
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Wealth Extraction Grade: 50.64/100. This grade reflects an extraordinary CEO-to-worker pay gulf — a ratio of 3,108:1, based on a three-year average of Compensation Actually Paid — set against a workforce where the median worker earned approximately $6,831 in a year.
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Playing by the Rules Grade: 100/100. No regulatory fines or violations appear on the public record for the two-year period, which the data reflects with a perfect score.
Hanesbrands ranks 13th out of 23 companies in the Clothing and clothing accessories retailers sector, with a score of 68.51 against a sector average of 68.8. The company trails its peers by a razor-thin margin rather than pulling ahead of them.
The Bottom Line: A CEO Earning 3,108 Times the Median Worker
Hanesbrands reported $3.5 billion in annual revenue — enough to rank it as a mid-size competitor in the clothing industry — yet its most striking financial choices happen not in its stores but in its pay structure. The CEO’s three-year average package of roughly $21 million dwarfed what the typical Hanesbrands worker earned, producing a gap so extreme it places this company among the most severe in the sector. No buybacks or dividends were paid out during the two-year period, and no regulatory penalties appear on the public record. The dominant story here is a compensation structure that funnels extraordinary wealth to the top while a largely offshore workforce earns wages that, in many of the countries where Hanesbrands manufactures, amount to subsistence-level pay.
Spending to Keep the Rules Favorable on Trade
Hanesbrands poured $180,000 into federal lobbying across the two-year period, according to filings with the Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA). That works out to roughly the annual earnings of two or three full-time workers at average U.S. wages — a modest sum by corporate lobbying standards, but a targeted one.
Every dollar was focused exclusively on trade. Lobbying Disclosure Act filings describe the activity as covering the Haiti HOPE/HELP trade acts, Western Hemisphere trade policy, and customs modernization — a cluster of issues that maps directly onto Hanesbrands’ global supply chain. The company manufactures much of its apparel in Central America and the Caribbean, so the rules governing import duties, trade preferences, and customs procedures at the border determine, in a very literal sense, how much the finished product costs to bring home. When lobbying filings reference the Haiti HOPE/HELP acts, they are referencing legislation that determines whether garments sewn in Haiti or Central America enter the U.S. at reduced or zero tariff rates. The company filed this issue area in seven separate quarters — every single quarter for which a filing appeared in this period.
Hanesbrands knocked on the doors of a coordinated set of agencies: the Department of Commerce (DOC), the House of Representatives, the Senate, U.S. Customs & Border Protection (CBP), and the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) — all seven times, all five institutions, every quarter. That is a well-mapped operation, not a one-off inquiry.
FEDERAL CONTACT LOG
Commerce, Dept of (DOC)
7
≈ every 71st business day
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
7
≈ every 71st business day
SENATE
7
≈ every 71st business day
U.S. Customs & Border Protection
7
≈ every 71st business day
U.S. Trade Representative (USTR)
7
≈ every 71st business day
5 federal bodies named in federal lobbying filings · 2024-Q3–2026-Q2
Between 2024-Q3 and 2026-Q2, Hanesbrands was named in lobbying filings reaching 5 federal bodies — from Commerce, Dept of (DOC) to HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES.
The Inside Track: Three of the company’s four registered lobbyists previously held government positions. Gerald Weller served as a Member of Congress for 14 years. Nicole Bivens Collinson served as Assistant Textile Negotiator at the USTR — the exact agency Hanesbrands lobbies on trade. Edward Steiner worked as a Legislative Assistant to Representative Farr. When a former USTR official is the one walking into the USTR’s offices on your behalf, the access that money buys comes pre-wired.
A Pay Gap That Strains Comprehension
No buybacks or dividends were recorded during the two-year period, so the starkest story in this section sits in the chasm between the executive suite and the shop floor.
The CEO pay ratio is 3,108:1, the 3-year average of Compensation Actually Paid, according to the SEC DEF 14A. To translate that into human scale: the CEO’s three-year average package was about $21.2 million. The median Hanesbrands worker — part of a largely offshore, global workforce of roughly 41,000 people — earned approximately $6,831 in a year. The CEO’s compensation averaged more than 3,100 times that amount. Put another way, the median worker would need to labor for over three millennia to match what the CEO took home on average over three years.
This is not a ratio that arrives by accident. It is the product of executive pay packages that include equity awards and incentive structures calibrated to financial metrics, set against a workforce that is predominantly located in lower-wage manufacturing countries. Both of those facts are structural decisions made by the board and compensation committees that approved them.
No buyback or dividend data is recorded for the two-year period, so no per-worker raise calculation is available. The absence of shareholder payouts does not shrink the compensation gap — it simply means the mechanism running it is the pay structure itself, not additional cash flows to shareholders.
A Clean Record on the Public Docket
No regulatory fines or violations appear in the public record for the two-year period. Based on available data, Hanesbrands accumulated zero penalties from federal or state enforcement actions during this time.
The Subsidy Side: While Hanesbrands ran a clean enforcement record, public records show that a government handed the company $6,415 in a grant in 2024. That award is attributed directly to Hanesbrands International. These are public dollars — taxpayer funds — flowing to a corporation with a $3.5 billion annual revenue base.