The protests against the mega bonus policy were not enough. Last year the CEOs of major companies listed on the London Stock Exchange they earned 183 times more than their average employee. Not only that: the gap between bosses and employees continues to grow, just think that only in 2010 the difference between payrolls was 160 to one. The data was disclosed by the High Pay Centre, a think tank which has monitored the growing income inequality between the various corporate levels, noting how the CEOs of companies listed on the FTSE100 earned on average £4,96 million in 2014, against 4,13 million in 2010.
“Compensation of this level goes far beyond the need to pay and motivate top managers,” comments Deborah Hargreaves, director of the High Pay Centre. It is more likely that they are the result of the obvious weaknesses and conflicts of interest that abound in UK corporate governance".
Last year, shareholders of companies like Burberry protested CEO payouts, while this year the protests have subsided. In theory, investors are free to vote against payments they deem unreasonable, but protest remains a niche phenomenonVotes against pay policies in London-listed companies average no more than 6,4 percent, according to the High Pay Centre.
On the other hand, the unstoppable growth of the gap between middle and top salaries is not just a British phenomenon. The situation is even more extreme in the United States, where – according to the calculations of another think tank, the Economic Policy Institute – in 2013 a CEO earned 295,9 times more than a normal worker. And the growth rate is stellar: the compensation of American CEOs soared by 937% between 1978 and 2013, against +10,2% for mid-range workers. In the 30s, the pay ratio was still about XNUMX to one.
To impose greater transparency on these numbers, at the beginning of the month the American Consob (Sec) announced that from 2018, US listed companies will have to make public the difference between the salaries of top management and those of ordinary workers. However, this is an information obligation that in no way limits the lunar compensation policy to the CEOs.
