The high internal pay gap not only exacerbates social income inequality at the micro enterprise level, but also hinders the realization of the concept of common prosperity in the field of corporate governance. The transformation toward digital intelligent production represented by industrial robots will not only have a significant impact on the business decision-making of enterprises, but also affect the internal corporate governance mechanism, including internal salary arrangements.

This paper investigates the impact of industrial automation on the internal pay gap. It is found that industrial automation can significantly narrow the internal pay gap, and capital intensity and executive salary comparison can enhance this inhibitory effect. Mechanism testing indicates that industrial automation can narrow the internal pay gap by optimizing the labor structure and salary structure. The research on the deconstruction of pay gap shows that industrial automation can not only effectively suppress the average salary of executives, but also increase the average salary of employees. Based on the in-depth study of salary distribution, from the perspective of incentive mode, the management shareholding enhances the inhibitory effect of industrial automation on the internal pay gap, and employee stock ownership plans can only play a role as a form of mixed reform in state-owned enterprises; from the perspective of distribution mode, tax structure and charitable donation optimize the relationship between industrial automation and the internal pay gap. Finally, the inhibitory effect of industrial automation on the excess pay gap can have a positive impact on corporate value.

This paper makes the following contributions: First, it makes an extensive analysis of common prosperity around “secondary distribution” and “tertiary distribution”, enriching the relevant research on the pay gap within enterprises under the concept of common prosperity. Second, it focuses on how the change of production mode brought about by the key technological progress of industrial automation affects the internal pay gap, providing useful insights for further investigating the motivation and restraint mechanism of the internal pay gap. Third, it discusses the influence and mechanism of industrial automation on the internal pay gap, which is helpful for understanding the impact of industrial automation on the strategic decision-making of micro enterprises, further expanding the research on the economic consequences of industrial automation.