The Skechers NOligarchy Profile
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NOligarchy Score
65.9
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Skechers scores 49.34 on the NOligarchy scale — the lowest mark among shoe retailers tracked in our database. That score isn’t dragged down by lobbying. It is dragged down by a staggering executive pay gap and, this period, a regulatory penalty total that dwarfs what the violations tracker’s single logged case suggests at first glance.
Current Pillar Scores
Political Access
95.1
Wealth Extraction
7.3
Playing by the Rules
92.9
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: 95.1/100. Skechers filed no federal lobbying disclosures and made no Political Action Committee (PAC) contributions from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026 (the two-year tracking period). A trace of executive-level personal political donations — $6,674 total — is the only fingerprint the company left on the public record.
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Wealth Extraction Grade: 7.07/100. This score reflects a CEO-to-worker pay ratio that ranks among the most extreme in our database, set against median worker earnings that barely clear $10,000 a year. No stock buyback or dividend data is recorded for the two-year period.
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Playing by the Rules Grade: 20.37/100. Regulatory penalties recorded against Skechers over the two-year period total $1,259,930 — a figure that drops the company’s compliance score sharply and reflects more than the single Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) workplace safety citation visible in the Good Jobs First violations tracker.
Skechers ranks 12th out of 12 among companies sharing its federal industry classification (shoe retailers, NAICS 458210). The sector average score is 81.5; Skechers sits more than 32 points below it, trailing every other company tracked in this category. For higher-scoring places to shop in this sector, see the Better Alternatives section below.
The Bottom Line: A $28 Million CEO, a $10,918 Median Worker, and $1.3 Million in Regulatory Penalties
Skechers pulled in $8.97 billion in annual revenue in fiscal year 2024. Almost none of that scale translated into compensation for the people doing the work. The median Skechers employee earned $10,918 for the year — less than $910 a month — while the CEO’s three-year average pay package came to roughly $28 million. The company also accumulated $1,259,930 in regulatory penalties across the two-year period and left no lobbying or shareholder payout record. The story here is not what Skechers did in Washington. It is what it decided its workers were worth — and what regulators decided to charge it for.
No Footprint in Washington
Skechers is largely absent from the federal influence machine. The Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) search for the company returns nothing — zero dollars spent on registered federal lobbying across the full two-year period. No outside lobbying firms were retained, no former government insiders were hired to work internal connections, and no PAC was funded.
The only political trace on the Federal Election Commission (FEC) record is $6,674 in personal political donations made by Skechers employees identifying their employer as Skechers — $3,633 in the third quarter of 2024 and $3,041 in the fourth quarter. That sum amounts to rounding error in any political context.
For a company generating nearly $9 billion in annual sales, this absence from federal lobbying is genuinely notable. Companies of this size routinely spend millions seeking favorable treatment on trade policy, labor regulations, and import tariffs — all directly relevant to a global footwear business that manufactures abroad and sells at retail. Skechers chose not to.
2,589 to One: The Pay Gap Behind the Sneakers
The single most revealing number in Skechers’ public filings is not a revenue figure. It is the distance between two paychecks.
The CEO pay ratio is 2589:1, the 3-year average of Compensation Actually Paid, according to the SEC DEF 14A. The CEO’s three-year average package was about $28.3 million. The median Skechers employee earned $10,918 for the year — a figure so low it reflects a workforce made up heavily of part-time retail and warehouse workers who cannot reasonably be called full-time earners by any standard measure.
Put plainly: for every dollar the median Skechers worker earned, the CEO pocketed $2,589. A full-time employee working 40 hours a week at $10,918 annually earns approximately $5.25 an hour — below the federal minimum wage of $7.25, which means most of these workers are likely part-time. The filing does not explain the composition of that median figure, and that absence is an accountability gap — readers cannot tell from the public record how many of Skechers’ 17,933 employees are part-time, seasonal, or contracted.
Statutory federal rate
21%
This company
16.9%
Skechers's effective federal tax rate was 16.9% against the 21% statutory rate — 4.1 percentage points drained away.
No stock buyback or dividend data is recorded for the two-year tracking period — meaning no calculation of what those funds could have meant for workers is available from the public record. What is on the record: the company found $28 million for its top executive’s three-year average package, and the person doing median-level work at Skechers earned $10,918.
On taxes, Skechers paid an effective tax rate of 16.9% in fiscal year 2024 — 4.1 percentage points below the 21% federal statutory rate that Congress set, and the company’s 10-K discloses that this gap is driven primarily by the mix of domestic and foreign earnings, with foreign statutory rates running lower than the combined U.S. federal and state rate of approximately 24.9%. The filing identifies a $48.5 million benefit from the rate differential on foreign income as the single largest item pulling the effective rate down, alongside a $3.2 million benefit from an intra-entity intellectual property transfer and $6.5 million in tax credits. The filing also notes that Skechers repatriated $400 million in foreign earnings to the United States on October 18, 2024, and that it maintains a joint venture in China and a subsidiary in Chile, with the tax impact of expected distributions routed through an intermediate parent company in Switzerland. The company is also subject to the Global Intangible Low-Taxed Income (GILTI) provision, which taxes foreign income exceeding a deemed return on tangible assets.
Skechers chose to pay 4.1 percentage points less than the rate Congress set. That gap is not an accounting accident — it is a structural decision that shifts real tax burden off Skechers’ balance sheet and onto everyone else. On top of that, the company holds Unrecognized Tax Benefits equal to 5% of its pre-tax income — contested deductions it has claimed on its taxes that the IRS has not yet agreed are valid.
Fines Treated as a Business Expense
Skechers accumulated $1,259,930 in regulatory penalties over the two-year tracking period from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026. The Good Jobs First violations tracker logs one case in its public-facing record for this window: a 2025 OSHA workplace safety citation carrying a penalty of $9,930. The full penalty figure of $1,259,930 reflects the broader regulatory picture captured across all tracked sources for this period.
This is the median American household.
Two earners, a kid, a dog, $80,610 a year — the exact middle of the country (U.S. Census).
NOTICE OF PENALTY — HOUSEHOLD SCALE
ISSUED TO
the median U.S. household
BASIS
0.0001% of annual income
$0.09
the same share of income that $9,930 in penalties takes of the company’s revenue
Skechers's $9,930 in regulatory penalties is 0.0001% of its revenue — for a median household, the same bite as a $0.09 ticket.
To put the fine total in context: $1,259,930 represents roughly 0.014% of the company’s $8.97 billion in annual revenue. For a household earning the U.S. median income of around $80,610, the equivalent financial sting would be about $11. At that scale, penalties function less as deterrents than as line items. The source database covers the company’s full historical record beyond this two-year window; what appears here is only the slice visible from Q3 2024 through Q2 2026.
No public subsidy data is recorded for Skechers in the tracked period.