The guy (or gal) in the big corner office is raking in the dough, while the worker bees scurry around for the scraps.
The Economic Policy Institute looked at the top 350 corporations in America and found that the worker-to-CEO pay-gap between those at the top of the ladder of everyone else below is a ratio of 312 to 1. For every one dollar in your pay check…they have a whole lot more zeroes.
Employment expert or author of the best-selling book The Real Truth about Success Garrison Wynn says they make the big bucks because their talents are so rare. “The number of people who have the skill set to be able to drive a company forward is minimum. Even off a great V-P team, maybe one person there would have the skill set.”
While employee’s wages have stalled overall, CEO pay averages $18.9 million a year, give or take, up 17% over last year.
CEO’s today make 312 times as much as their average worker, a significant increase over 1965’s ratio of 20 to one, or 1989’s 58 to one radio.
And if 312-to-one sounds a bit exorbitant, remember that it’s an average. At Walmart, the average employee earns just under $20,000 a year, while the CEO collects $22.8 million, a ratio of 1,188 to one. At McDonalds one can expect to rake in a little over $7,000 a year, the big boss is taking home more than $21 million, a ratio of 3,101-to-one.
“I think if you’re going to choose to work for a company, one where the CEO is being compensated a lot is one where you’re more likely to be compensated a lot,” says Wynn.
The one person you can generally assume is not running through the office singing “Take This Job and Shove It” is the CEO.