Bosses of Britain's biggest companies will earn more in the first three days of this week than the average workers' annual wage. FTSE CEOs had to work 34 hours to beat median annual pay. Median FTSE 100 chief executive pay was £3.61m in 2019, 115 times the average pay of full-time UK workers,the last year for which a full set of data is available, the High Pay Centre said.
High Pay Centre director Luke Hildyard said chief executive pay is about 120 times that of the typical UK worker, up significantly from two decades ago.
"Estimates suggest it was around 50 times at the turn of the millennium or 20 times in the early 1980s," he said. "...the outsourcing of low-paid work and the decline of trade union membership have widened the gaps between those at the top and everybody else over recent decades."
The thinktank’s calculations assume “a highly demanding workload” for CEOs of 320 12-hour days of work a year. This equates to hourly pay of £941 an hour. It would take a worker on the full minimum wage rate of £8.72 an hour 212 years to earn the same as the average CEO earns in a year.
Online supermarket Ocado has been singled out as having the biggest pay gap between those at the top and those on the shop floor. Its chief executive, Tim Steiner, was paid £58.7m in 2019 , which works out at 2,605 times the £22,500 paid to the online grocery delivery company’s staff on average. It means Steiner was paid about 10 times as much as the average Ocado worker’s annual salary for just one day’s work.
Frances O’Grady, general secretary of the TUC, said the fact that bosses had earned so much money already “tells you everything you need to know about how unfair our economy is."
" Our army of minimum wage workers – carers, shop assistants and delivery drivers – have kept the country going through the pandemic. Not these CEO’s at the top raking in far more than their share,” she said. “ If the government is serious about levelling up Britain, it needs to start by levelling up pay and conditions for those we most rely on, and stop the threat to freeze key workers’ pay.”
Warren Kenny, acting general secretary of the GMB union said: “These repugnant figures expose the sheer scale of inequality and exploitation in the workplace. The workers who have made heroic sacrifices to keep society together during the [coronavirus] outbreak deserve better – it is time for corporate leaders, shareholders and politicians to wake up and take action.”
Top UK bosses are paid 115 times more than average worker, analysis finds | Business | The Guardian
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