Fat Cat CEOs

Bosses of top British companies will have made more money by lunchtime on Thursday than the average UK worker will earn in the entire year.

The chief executives of FTSE 100 companies are paid a median average of £3.45m a year, which works out at 120 times the £28,758 collected by full-time UK workers on average.

On an hourly basis the bosses will have earned more in less than three working days than the average employee will pick up this year.

Frances O’Grady, the TUC general secretary, said it was outrageous that bosses were picking up “salaries that look like telephone numbers” while workers were “suffering the longest pay squeeze since Napoleonic times”.

Tim Roache, the general secretary of the GMB union, said the pay gap between bosses and workers was “simply obscene”.

“Does anyone really think these fat cats deserve 100 times more than the hard-working people who prop up their business empires?” he said. “Workers who have to scrimp and save to feed their families and put a roof over their head – and like most of Britain’s working population will now be feeling the pinch after the festive period?”

Stefan Stern, the director of the High Pay Centre thinktank, said,  " There are still grossly excessive and unjustifiable gaps between the top and rest of the workforce,” he said.

The analysis by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) and the High Pay Centre shows chief executives of FTSE 100 companies are paid an average of £898 per hour – 256 times what apprentices earn on the minimum wage.

The highest paid chief executive in the analysis, which is based on 2016 figures, was Sir Martin Sorrell, who was paid £48m by advertising firm WPP. In 2015 WPP paid Sorrell £70m. His reduced pay helped bring down the FTSE 100 chief executives’ median pay packages from £3.97m in 2015 to £3.45m in 2016. 

The title for the highest paid listed company boss this year is almost certain to be Jeff Fairburn, the chief executive of housebuilder Persimmon, who is on track to collect a £110m bonus.