Golden CEOs

 The London-based High Pay Centre has just released an analysis of British public opinion toward corporate pay gaps in the UK. These gaps are now running disturbingly wide. The typical chief at one of the UK’s 350 biggest corporations is taking home 53 times the company’s most typical worker pay. Eight of those companies are sporting CEO-worker pay differentials over 200 times.

Back in 1989, the Washington, D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute reported last August, CEOs at the top 350 publicly traded U.S. corporations were realizing an average 61 times typical worker compensation. By 2020 that pay gap had reached 351 times. In one recent year, the Institute for Policy Studies notes, America’s 50 highest paid execs all made over 1,000 times their typical worker pay.

The personal finance site, GOBankingRates, has taken a stab at translating gaps this wide into hours and minutes. In 2019, the site’s analysts point out, Intel CEO Robert Swan pocketed just under $67 million. Swan matched — in just one hour and six minutes — that year’s average annual income of families in America’s poorest 20 percent.

Opinion | Our Outrageous CEO-Worker Pay Gap: Unfair and Unwise | Sam Pizzigati (commondreams.org)