Bosses get 21% rise

Submitted by Matthew on 15 October, 2014 - 10:58 Author: Matt Cooper

Despite much sound and fury over government regulations on the reporting and control of executive pay announced in 2012, bosses’ pay continues to run ahead of workers’.

The median pay of directors of big companies (FTSE 100) is now £2,433,000; of chief executives, £3,344,000. Last year, so a report from Income Data Services shows, they got a 21% rise: median salary increased by 2.5%, bonuses by 12%, and incentive payments in the form of shares by 44%.

Bosses in Media, Marketing and Leisure have their snouts particularly deep in the trough, with average earnings of nearly £7 million a year. Bosses in the retail sector have to cope with just £1.3 million a year.

Chief executives’ pay has increased nearly four-fold since 2000, while full-time workers’ pay has increased by less than 50 per cent (less than inflation).

In 2000 CEOs earned 47 times the pay of the average full-time worker. Now they earn 120 times as much.

The latest TUC quarterly report finds that in the last year, the pay of the average employee has risen by 1.4 per cent, just keeping pace with inflation, while profits have increased by over 10 per cent. Thus, wages remain frozen.

High pay brings power as well as luxury. At the Tories’ fund-raising winter party in February 2014, bosses paid £1,000 for dinner so that they could sit with government ministers able to affect their businesses.

The total wealth of the 570 guests added up to £22 billion. Questioned by journalists now, the bosses say piously that at dinner they had only "wide-ranging political discussion", not about specifics of government policy.

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