If one of your fantasies is having a semi-tractor-trailer back up to your house and dump a giant mountain of cash on your front lawn, you should consider becoming the CEO of a large corporation. Recent data published by the AFL-CIO covered CEO pay rates from 2020 to 2021 and compared them to the median salary of employees working in the same company—and the differences are staggering.
The AFL-CIO is a pro-union lobby, so its motivation behind compiling this data is definitely pro-worker. But even so, the result is fairly egregious. While the numbers vary between industry sectors, some all-up calculations show that S&P 500 CEOs earned average salaries of about $15.5 million last year, more than 300 times the pay scale of their own workers.
According to the data, the largest gap is in the Consumer Discretionary sector, which includes Amazon’s retail operation, Nike, and McDonald’s. On average, CEO pay in this sector was a honking 741 times higher than that of their average worker. Consumer Staples ranked next on the list, at a little over half of the gap in Consumer Discretionary, with CEOs making an average of 383 times more than their average employee. In case you’re wondering, the Consumer Discretionary sector covers companies selling non-essential goods (like a huge swath of what Amazon hawks, sneakers, or Big Macs). Consumer Staples refers to daily necessities, which is the category in which the S&P analysts delegated Proctor & Gamble and Coca-Cola. Personally, I don’t need a Coke every day, but maybe I’m weird.
Healthcare was also a CEO-to-median-employee pay-ratio offender, but it had the lowest number of the top five, with its CEOs raking in just 253 times as much as their average employee. And as for technology, Communications Services and Information Technology each made the top-five list with ratios of 334:1 and 315:1, respectively. But that doesn’t quite let tech companies off the hook in terms of CEO wage sin.
Dublin headquartered, Aptiv Plc had the second-highest pay difference of any S&P 500 company, with its undoubtedly grinning CEO, Kevin Clark, pulling in $31,267,329 in 2020—5,294 times what his average worker made in the same year. Only Abercrombie & Fitch had a wider gap, with 6,565:1.
The third-biggest gap was also a tech company, namely Western Digital. Its CEO, David Goeckeler, snarfed up $35,723,376 in 2020, which placed him at 4,934 times higher than his median employees. By contrast, Tim Cook’s Apple comp of $14,769,259 and Satya Nadella’s $44,321,788 income from Microsoft placed them at just 256:1 and 257:1, respectively.
Do CEOs really work hard enough to earn these sky-high salaries? I suppose that depends on how you define the words “earn” and “work.” But on the upside, someone needs to keep the superyacht industry in business.
