By John Pickard
Most of the mainstream media ignore the press releases and research of the trade union movement, but the TUC’s latest report will be noted carefully by all those workers fighting to maintain their living standards, as they are threatened by the deepest cut in sixty years. The report adds powerful arguments in support of those workers fighting for decent pay awards.
The media is full of arguments about how ‘we’ cannot afford for workers to get decent pay, but that argument is never applied to the heads of industries and big companies, most of whom are raking in big increases.
The TUC, with the High Pay Unit, undertook a survey of Chief Executive Officer salaries and these are the main points they came up with:
- For the FTSE top 100 companies, the median pay was £3.41mn in 2021, the highest since 2018. It is an increase of 39% on 2020, which stood at £2.46mn. The median total spend on executive pay (including the CEOs and other executives) for FTSE 100 companies was £6.3 million.
- This level of pay means that the FTSE 100 CEO median is 109 times the median earnings of a UK full-time worker in 2021, currently at £31,285. This represents an increase from 79:1 last year and has widened beyond the gap of 107:1 in 2019.
- The ‘mean’ FTSE 100 CEO pay, what is usually described as the ‘average’ was similarly higher than in the previous year, at £4.26mn, up from £3.4mn in 2020.
- The highest paid FTSE 100 CEO received £16.85mn, at Endeavour, 539 times the pay of the median UK full-time worker.
- Nine tenths of the top FTSE 100 companies paid their CEO a bonus in 2021, compared to only two thirds in 2020 and 89% in 2019. The average bonus payment increased from £828,000 in 2020 to £1.431mn in 2021. This represents an increase of over 72%
- More than three quarters of the top FTSE 100 companies paid their CEO a payment as part of a Long Term Incentive Plan (LTIP), and the average LTIP payment increased from £1,379k in 2020 to £1,610k in 2021, an increase of over 16%, still well ahead of inflation.
- There were nine female FTSE 100 CEOs in 2021, two more than in 2020.
- Excluding Harbour and Entain’s female CEOs, who were appointed midway through the financial year, the median pay of the remaining seven female CEOs, who were in role for the duration of the 2021 financial year, was £3.01 million, below the median pay of male FTSE 100 CEOs at £3.49 million. Even in the boardrooms of the rich and super-rich, the men are richer than the women.
- For the wider group of FTSE250 companies, the median CEO pay was £1.72mn in 2021, a 38% increase on 2020. The median FTSE 250 CEO is paid 55 times the median UK worker. This is an increase from 40:1 in 2020.
This information from the TUC should be disseminated far and wide in the labour movement. For the rich and super-rich, there is no cost of living crisis. The trade union movement is 100 per cent justified in fighting for pay rises at least in line with inflation and the expected inflation in the coming twelve months.
