Monday, July 9, 2012

Show Me the Money!

As you start your work week today at the jobs you all love, I have some interesting information for you. I guarantee this will make you love your job even more.
A few weeks ago my husband and I were having a discussion about business, the economy and the whole executive pay issue. We talked about how the top dogs at companies now make ridiculous amounts of money. This led me to do some research on companies that are publicly traded as all that information is public record.
I read about one CEO (and many others like him) that made a base salary last year of over $1.3 million dollars, not to mention stock and option awards of over $10 million, a cash bonus of $5 million, and other perks of three-quarters of a million dollars.
If you work for an international company, I’m sure your man (or possibly woman, but not likely) in charge probably made something similar last year as well. But here is where I have a problem, on just the base salary alone, I make 3.5% of what a company big man makes. So it would appear to me that I need to work 3.5% of the time he works. So let’s say that he works 24/7. That’s 8736 hours a year. So now when I see 3.5% of that – heck, I only need to work 306 hours a year – that, my friend is only 7.6 forty hour weeks a year. And that means that I should get 44.4 weeks of vacation. Whoop, Whoop!
But alas, my job is not as important to my company as a CEO’s job. The CEO is much more valuable to the company than I am. I can be easily replaced. But since companies look at just financials and numbers, it appears that he does the same work “on paper”, based on the pay, as me and 27.84 of my co-workers. That’s enough workers to fill up two passenger vans or a short bus. Wow, no wonder that CEO needs the free private jet and free luxury housing, even though he could afford to pay that cost over several times.
I am sure that it’s the same at your company. It was the same at mine and it was the same at my husband’s company when we checked the numbers. And based on the following New York Times article this will not be stopping anytime soon - http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/business/executive-pay-still-climbing-despite-a-shareholder-din.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper.
This crazy pay is a contributing factor to problems with the overall economy and the rise in unemployment. Companies will cut 30 jobs that pay $30,000 to $70,000 to save a million dollars and overload the people who are able to keep their jobs. But imagine those jobs could be saved if they just reduced the stock bonus to the CEO by 10%. Would that be such a hardship for a man who makes millions? I mean, how in the world can a man spend that much money if he’s working 24/7?
So I’m complaining about the average CEO, but I guess it could be worse. I could work at Apple where:
“It's good to be the king, or CEO, as the case may be. At least when it comes to pay. With a staggering total compensation package of $378 million for 2011, Apple's Tim Cook takes the cake for the highest Fortune 50 CEO-to-typical-worker pay ratio. Indeed, it takes 6,258 typ230x300[1]ical Apple worker salaries to match Cook's total pay.”
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2012/ceo-pay-ratios/
That is a heck of a lot of iPads, iPhones and iPods folks. 
Alright, now that I’ve totally depressed all of you non-executive workers, close out of the internet and get back to work. You have a lot of hours to put in if you ever plan to reach executive level at your company.

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