January 6, 2011
The Rich Can Already Call It a YearPosted by Mark Engler on @ 6:36 pm
Cross-posted from the “Arguing the World” blog at Dissent magazine.Well, 2011, it’s been nice. But I think we’ve worked enough already. In any case, we’ve already made enough money. Time to call it a year.
This is a ridiculous idea, right? Yet, as the Canadian Financial Post reported at the beginning of the week, “Top CEOs will have earned average workers’ full annual pay by 2:30 p.m. today.” The “today” in question was Monday, January 3, the first business day of the year. Here’s their explanation:
Canada’s best-paid chief executives earned 155 times the average income earner during the darkest days of the recession, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives said in a report Monday.
Declaring that those 100 chief executives were “recession proof,” the think tank said they earned an average of $6.6 million in 2009 compared with $42,988 for the average Canadian.
That means by 2:30 p.m. Monday, the first working day of the year, those CEOs will have earned the full year’s wage of the average Canadian, said Hugh Mackenzie, the author’s study and research associate for the centre.
The discrepancy is almost 50 per cent higher than just over a decade ago, in 1998, when CEOs took home an average pay 104 times higher than the average wage earner, the centre said.
“Even that extraordinary number understates the real story,” Mackenzie wrote. “Thanks to a change in corporate reporting introduced in 2008, we only have a conservative statistical estimate of the stock options that make up about one third of CEOs’ 2009 pay. The public will never know how much these CEOs actually got paid in 2009.
I’m not sure how the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, when producing this brilliant bit of PR, crunched the numbers to come up with the exact time of 2:30 p.m. on January 3. However, their general point stands. And, in fact, the situation is even worse in the United States. Here, as the AFL-CIO has tracked, the average compensation for a Fortune 500 CEO is $9.25 million per year. Even if we grant that these businesspeople are workaholics putting in seventy-hour workweeks and taking no vacation, that comes to $2,541 for every hour they labor.
Calling it quits after the first week of January, these American CEOs would each be able to take home an annual income of over $177,000. ............(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://blogs.alternet.org/speakeasy/2011/01/06/the-rich-can-already-call-it-a-year/
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