CEO pay rose 17% in 2021 as profits soared; workers trailed

CEO pays are up by 17 percent while regular workers win 4.4 percent, their biggest raises in decades. Here’s the full story.

CEO pays soar high as workers lag behind

According to data analyzed by Equilar for Associated Press, last year the typical package for chief executives running S&P 500 companies soared by 17.1 percent. Totaling the gains by a median of $14.5 million. These gains tower over the 4.4 percent hike in wages and benefits betted by workers in the private sector for the same period. The gains are the fastest on record in the last two decades. The pay raises for several ranks and file workers are failing to keep up with inflation that reached 7 percent by the end of 2021. The imbalance of pay is rising anger in many. According to a survey, American politicians see the CEO pay as staggeringly high and investors are pushing back.

CEO pays were seen rising as profits and stock prices rebound sharply as economies around the world roared out of the brief recession. This is because most of a CEO’s compensation is strongly related to performance, Hence, their pay packages balloon after years of moderating growth. In several eye-catching executive positions, companies give huge grants of stock to recently appointed CEOs who are navigating their firms through the pandemic. They also do this for established leaders, convincing them to hang around.

The growing imbalance between executives and workers

However, the executives can not cash in the stocks for years unless the company is meeting performance targets. However, disclosing estimates of worth is a requirement for companies. Last year, only a quarter of pay packages for all S&P 500 CEOs were actual cash. Despite this composition, the pay gap between CEOs and rank-and-file employees is widening. This year, in over half of the companies, it will take an employee in the middle of the firm’s pay scale a minimum of 186 years to make what their CEO did in 2017. The number is up from 166 a year from the year before.

For example, a median associate at Walmart made $25,335 in compensation in 2021. This means that half of Walmart employees made more, and half less than this. The value is 21 percent higher than $20,942 from the previous data. Additionally, the firm increased its average hourly wage for associates in the US to $17 from $14.50 in January 2021. In terms of percentage, this rise is better than what Walmart CEO Doug McMillion got. However, his 13.7 percent gets him a total package that has a value of $25.7 million.

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