Big Median S&P 500 CEO Pay Raise Along With Bad Outcomes? Yep.
The median S&P 500 CEO pay raise last year far outpaced the raise for the median worker according to a new AP report. The numbers, as usual, will probably turn your stomach. And this raise occurred while their companies' stocks earned investors "a big fat zero". Let's get straight into some numbers.
The raise alone for median CEO pay last year, $468,449, is more than 10 times what the typical U.S. worker makes in a year. The median full-time worker earned $809 weekly in 2015, up from $791 in 2014.
While ten times the typical worker seems like a lot, I have news for you: it's not.
The winner in the CEO pay raise sweepstakes last year was Expedia's Dara Khosrowshahi. He raked in $94.6 million, a pay increase of 881%. So, the next time you ask for a pay raise, remember to start at 1000% and negotiate your way down to this compromise.
Female CEOs made more, on average, than their male counterparts, but the number of women in the survey is still depressingly low:
Of the 341 executives in the study, just 17 were female. However, those female executives earned a median $18.0 million, compared to $10.5 million at the median for the 324 male executives.
The average S&P 500 CEO pay for 2015 was $12.4 million or 335 times more than the average worker, according to a recent AFL-CIO report. What's most staggering about that is the fact most Americans are in the dark about the size of these numbers, as stated in the AP report:
...most Americans severely underestimate how much CEOs make. The typical American believes big-company CEOs average $1 million in pay.
The reality: of the 341 CEOs listed in the report, only 2 made $1 million. The other 339, or 99.4%, made over that amount. Obviously, many were well over that amount.
But conservatives will inevitably cry foul and yell class warfare when these facts are pointed out. Some will even claim it's dishonest to measure just S&P 500 CEO pay and not include all CEOs. For example, conservative think tank AEI puts the ratio of CEO to worker pay at less than 4 to 1 when using all CEOs. But that's a little deceiving when you take a closer look at the workforce numbers, so let’s do that.
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