
CEO–Employee Pay Gaps Widen in US and UK

The latest analysis by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute calculates that the CEOs of the largest 350 companies in the US out-earned their employees by a factor of 312:1 last year, the Guardian reported on Thursday:
The rise came after the bosses of America’s largest companies got an average pay rise of 17.6% in 2017, taking home an average of $18.9m in compensation while their employees’ wages stalled, rising just 0.3% over the year. The pay gap has risen dramatically, with some fluctuations, since the 1990s. In 1965 the ratio of CEO to worker pay was 20-to-one; that figure had risen to 58-to-one by in 1989 and peaked in 2000 when CEOs earned 344 times the wage of their average worker. …
The astronomical gap between the remuneration of workers and bosses has been brought into sharper focus by a new financial disclosure rule that forces companies to publish the ratio of CEO to worker pay. Last year, McDonald’s boss Steve Easterbrook earned $21.7m while the McDonald’s workers earned a median wage of just $7,017 – a CEO to worker pay ratio of 3,101-to-one. The average Walmart worker earned $19,177 in 2017 while CEO Doug McMillon took home $22.8m – a ratio of 1,188-to-one.
In the UK, meanwhile, new research by the CIPD and the High Pay Centre finds that the median CEO-employee pay ratio for FTSE 100 companies stood at 167:1 in 2017, rising from 153:1 the previous year: