The Lee / Wrangler NOligarchy Profile
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Lee / Wrangler — the denim workwear brands owned by Kontoor Brands — earns a NOligarchy Score of 56.52 out of 100. On a scale where 100 is perfect (meaning zero lobbying, zero regulatory infractions, and zero wealth extraction), this score reflects a company that stays relatively quiet in Washington and clean with regulators but aggressively redirects cash away from the workers stitching its jeans and toward shareholders and a stratospherically paid chief executive.
Current Pillar Scores
Political Access
60.9
Wealth Extraction
20.7
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: 60.85/100. Lee / Wrangler spent $400,000 on federal lobbying from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026 (8 quarters — the two-year tracking period), deployed a boutique firm stacked with former congressional and White House insiders, and sent lobbyists through the doors of both the House and Senate, the Department of State, the U.S. Trade Representative’s (USTR’s) office, and the White House itself — all in pursuit of a single issue: trade policy. No Political Action Committee (PAC) contributions were reported.
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Wealth Extraction Grade: 20.38/100. This is the most damaging number in the profile. The CEO’s Compensation Actually Paid ran at 1,754 times the median worker’s annual earnings, and the company channeled tens of millions into buybacks and more than $100 million a year in dividends — money that flowed upward while the median employee took home just $10,618 a year.
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Playing by the Rules Grade: 100/100. A perfect score. No regulatory fines or violations appear on the public record.
Lee / Wrangler ranks 19th out of 23 companies in the Clothing and clothing accessories retailers sector. The sector average score is 69.7 — Lee / Wrangler trails that benchmark by more than 13 points. The brand sits in the bottom quarter of its peer group, with the wealth extraction numbers as the primary drag pulling it down.
The Bottom Line: The Workers Who Make the Jeans Earn $10,618 a Year While the CEO Pockets 1,754 Times That
Lee / Wrangler reported $3.15 billion in annual revenue. The brand holds a 0.96% share of the clothing and clothing accessories retail market. But the most revealing number in this entire profile is not on the income statement: it is the $10,618 median annual salary paid to the 9,169 workers who keep this brand alive. That is below the federal poverty line for a family of two. While those workers earned poverty-adjacent paychecks, the company chose to push $110.7 million in buybacks and $228.1 million in dividends out the door over the most recent two fiscal years — cash that did not go to raises, did not go to safety improvements, and did not go to the workforce. It went to shareholders. And the CEO, over three years of Compensation Actually Paid averages, earned 1,754 times what a median Lee / Wrangler worker took home.
A Quiet but Well-Connected Trade Lobbying Machine
Lee / Wrangler spent $400,000 on federal lobbying over the two-year period — a comparatively modest sum, but one deployed with surgical precision. Every single lobbying filing under the Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) listed one issue area: trade — domestic and foreign. The filings describe the mandate as providing “strategic counsel and advocacy on international trade and public policy matters impacting the apparel supply chain.” That is the entire ballgame for Lee / Wrangler: the brand sources fabric and finished goods across multiple countries, and tariff rates, trade agreements, and customs classifications can swing its cost structure by hundreds of millions of dollars. When trade rules change, this company’s margins move — which is why it purchased access to the rooms where those rules are written.
To do that purchasing, Lee / Wrangler retained a single firm: BGR Government Affairs, a boutique operation that also lobbies for Verizon and other major corporate clients. All three lobbyists on that contract are former government insiders. Maya Seiden served inside the White House Counsel’s Office, advised the White House Chief of Staff, and held senior roles in the Department of Energy and the Office of the Deputy Secretary of State. Lester Munson served as Staff Director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC), Chief of Staff to two members of Congress, a communications director at SFRC, and a communications director on the House Foreign Affairs Committee (HFAC). Joseph Lai was a Special Assistant to the President for Legislative Affairs, a Legislative Director for Senator Roger Wicker, and a policy advisor to Senators George Voinovich and Chuck Hagel. This is not a general-purpose lobbying roster — it is a trade-and-foreign-policy team assembled specifically to navigate customs policy, USTR proceedings, and diplomatic supply-chain negotiations.
Those three lobbyists knocked on doors at the House of Representatives eight times, the Senate eight times, the USTR five times, the White House Office five times, and the Department of State three times over the two-year period. No specific bills were cited in the filings reviewed. No PAC contributions were reported, and no executive personal donations to federal candidates appear on the public record for this period.
FEDERAL CONTACT LOG
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
8
≈ every 62nd business day
SENATE
8
≈ every 62nd business day
U.S. Trade Representative (USTR)
5
≈ every 100th business day
White House Office
5
≈ every 100th business day
State, Dept of (DOS)
3
≈ every 167th business day
5 federal bodies named in federal lobbying filings · 2024-Q3–2026-Q2
Between 2024-Q3 and 2026-Q2, Lee / Wrangler was named in lobbying filings reaching 5 federal bodies — from HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES to SENATE.
Shared Lobbying Exposure
Lee / Wrangler
client
BGR GOVERNMENT AFFAIRS
lobbying firm
Verizon
also a client
Why it matters: the same firm argues Lee / Wrangler’s case and its rivals’ — one hire buys a web of shared access that can’t be seen from outside. This network worsens Lee / Wrangler’s political-access score (see methodology for the exact factor).
A $10,618 Paycheck at the Bottom, $18.6 Million at the Top
The single most important fact about Lee / Wrangler’s finances is buried in its proxy statement: the median Lee / Wrangler employee earned $10,618 in a year. That figure is not a typo. It works out to roughly $884 a month — not enough to cover average rent in any major American city, barely enough to cover it in most rural ones.
At the other end of the pay scale, the CEO pay ratio is 1754:1, the 3-year average of Compensation Actually Paid, per the SEC DEF 14A. The CEO’s three-year average package was about $18.6 million. A median Lee / Wrangler worker would need to labor for 1,754 years to match that. A ratio this extreme does not happen by accident; it is the product of deliberate pay-setting choices made by the same board that approves buybacks and dividends.
Over fiscal years 2024 and 2025, Lee / Wrangler carried out a deliberate reduction in shares outstanding that inflates per-share metrics and triggers executive performance bonuses — spending $110.7 million buying back its own stock. Over those same two years, it employed 9,169 workers.
Buybacks vs. Workers
What the buyback spend could have meant for 9K employees
Spent on buybacks
$110.7M
directed to shareholders
÷ 9K
workers
Per-worker raise
$12,071
per employee, 2-year total
Spread over those 2 years, that's a 57% annual raise on the median worker's $10,618 salary — money the company chose to send to shareholders instead.
The company made a deliberate choice. The money spent on buying back its own stock could have instead handed every single one of its 9,169 workers a $12,070.78 raise, spread across the last 2 fiscal years. Spread evenly across those two years, that works out to a $6,035.39 annual raise the company chose not to give.
But buybacks are only part of the payout picture. Lee / Wrangler also funneled $228.1 million in dividends to shareholders across those same two fiscal years — $116.1 million in fiscal year 2025 alone, equivalent to 3.7% of annual revenue. The data shows the company did not have to choose between its investors and its workforce in any narrow sense; it paid out $228.1 million in traditional dividends and still had $110.7 million in buyback dollars that could have gone to workers. It chose not to. Instead, the company ran both payout streams simultaneously — dividends for regular investors, buybacks layered on top to compress the share count, lift earnings per share, and trigger the performance-based bonuses tied to exactly those metrics for the executives who approved the plan.
When a company reduces its outstanding shares, each remaining share claims a larger slice of the same earnings — even if the underlying business has not grown at all. That mechanically lifts Earnings Per Share (EPS), which is frequently the trigger for executive performance bonuses. The same executives whose compensation averaged about $18.6 million per year approved the buyback program. The workers whose median take-home sat at $10,618 had no seat at that table.
On taxes, Lee / Wrangler paid an effective tax rate of 24.3% — 3.3 percentage points above the 21% federal statutory rate that Congress set. The company’s 10-K discloses a rate reconciliation showing several cross-border forces pulling in opposite directions. The single largest item reducing the tax bill was a Panama preferential rate differential, cutting the effective rate by 3.2 percentage points, followed closely by Hong Kong statutorily exempt income at 2.8 percentage points. On the other side of the ledger, activity in other foreign jurisdictions pushed the rate back up by 3.2 percentage points — largely offsetting those offshore reductions — and Global Intangible Low-Taxed Income (GILTI) charges, Subpart F income items, and nondeductible employee compensation each added more than a percentage point to the bill. The net result: those offshore arrangements did not produce an overall rate reduction relative to the statutory rate; they contributed to a rate that landed 3.3 points above it. Lee / Wrangler holds Unrecognized Tax Benefits equal to 5% of its pre-tax income — contested deductions it has claimed on its taxes that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has not yet agreed are valid.
Statutory federal rate
21%
This company
24.3%
Lee / Wrangler's effective federal tax rate was 24.3% against the 21% statutory rate — -3.3 percentage points drained away.
A Clean Record on the Public Docket
On regulatory compliance, Lee / Wrangler’s record is spotless. No fines, no violations, and no penalties appear anywhere on the public record reviewed for this profile. The Playing by the Rules score is a perfect 100 out of 100. No public subsidy data was reported either. The brand that pays its median worker $10,618 a year has not — at least on the public docket — been caught breaking the rules in the process.