Yahoo Finance 'Fat Cat Thursday' sees UK's top bosses pass average worker's earnings by lunchtime
Britain’s top bosses made more money by lunchtime on Thursday than the average worker will earn in a year.
New figures show that chief executives of FTSE 100 companies are paid a median average of £3.45m a year – that’s about 120 times the £28,758 picked up by full-time UK workers.
“Fat Cat Thursday” was dubbed obscene by unions, while Stefan Stern, director of the High Pay Centre, which collated the figures, said the salaries showed there were “grossly excessive and unjustifiable gaps” between those at the top and the rest of the British workforce.
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The analysis of 2016 salaries by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) and the High Pay Centre shows bosses of FTSE 100 companies are paid an average of £898 per hour – 256 times what apprentices earn on the minimum wage.
Executive pay actually dropped by a fifth last year. The average CEO of one of the UK’s largest 100 listed firms earned £4.5m last year, down from £5.4m the year before.
The calculation is based on executives working 12 hours a day, most weekends, and taking just 19 days holiday a year.
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It means bosses need only to work 32 hours – taking them to Thursday, assuming they started work on 2 January – to reach the median full-time employee salary.
Peter Cheese, chief executive of the CIPD, said: “The drop in pay in the last year is welcome but will have largely been driven by the Prime Minister’s proposed crackdown on boardroom excess.
“We need a radical rethink on how and why we reward chief executives, taking into account a much more balanced scorecard of success beyond financial outcomes and looking more broadly at areas like people management.”
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The highest paid boss from this survey was Sir Martin Sorrell, chief executive of advertising giant WPP, although his pay fell from £70.4m to £48.1m.
He will likely be usurped at the top by Denise Coates, the billionaire founder and boss of gambling firm Bet365, who paid herself £217m last year but was not part of HPC/CIPD review.
Frances O’Grady, the TUC general secretary, said it was outrageous that bosses were picking up “salaries that look like telephone numbers” while workers were “suffering the longest pay squeeze since Napoleonic times”.
And Tim Roache, the general secretary of the GMB union, added: “Does anyone really think these fat cats deserve 100 times more than the hard-working people who prop up their business empires?”
As part of government reforms, about 900 listed companies will have to soon publish and justify the pay ratio between their chief executives and their average worker.
The minimum wage for over-25s is set to rise from £7.50 to £7.83 an hour on 1 April. Under-18s can be paid as little as £4.05 and apprentices £3.50.
