Before you get all excited, no this isn’t brillig tackling the worldwide epidemic of feline obesity, as she is focused on her personal relationship with the scale. It’s also not an early Mardi Gras diary post story into which pootie insurgents activists have occupied diary post story titles and are demanding snacks and little squeeky toys. No, it’s what UK think tank High Pay Centre has named today. Grab your ploughman’s lunch and follow me below the dingledoodle Story Break, after a word from our sponsor…
Here at Top Comments we strive to nourish community by rounding up some of the site's best, funniest, most mojo'd & most informative commentary, and we depend on your help!! If you see a comment by another Kossack that deserves wider recognition, please send it either to topcomments at gmail or to the Top Comments group mailbox by 9:30pm Eastern. Please please please include a few words about why you sent it in as well as your user name (even if you think we know it already :-)), so we can credit you with the find!
From the High Pay Centre press release:
By the end of the first Tuesday in 2016, Britain’s top bosses will have made more money in 2016 than the average UK worker earns in an entire year, according to our calculations.
The calculations show that earnings for company executives returning to work in the new year will pass the UK average salary of £27,645 [for full-time workers at their position for >12mo] by late afternoon on “Fat Cat Tuesday”.
FTSE 100 chief executives are paid an average £4.96 million a year…
The think tank notes that even if they assume these CEOs work 12hr days, 3/4 weekends, and take <10 holiday (vacation) days per year, that still works out to £1260/hr. They advocate ensuring “ordinary workers” sit on the committees that set executive pay, and for publication of the pay gap between the highest and median earner within a company.
I can’t even begin to get my head around making that much each year, and have absolutely no concept of what exactly one would do with that. Yes, I know it includes stock and other non- direct to bank account compensation, but even if ‘only’ 25% were Actual Cash, that’s still a helluva lot of fun money. And it’s not just company CEOs making that much… Top partners at major law firms, banking executives, etc all make astronomical amounts per year. I know this because while googling ‘FTSE’, I stumbled across what reads as an Executive Apologist paper detailing why those poooooor CEOs are ‘only’ making ~0.5% of the combined post-tax profits made by the FTSE 100 last year.
But back to Fat Cat Tuesday. Even if the calculations are absolutely wrong, and let’s for the purposes of discussion say it “really” takes weeks longer, until February 1… that still is to my mind insane. It’s not just the United Kingdom, either. I found a neat interactive at Payscale.com that shows the difference in pay between a CEO and his or her employees at the hundred highest-grossing publicly traded companies in the United States (2013 data). Results range from a high (or is that despicably low) ratio of 422:1 for CVS Caremark to 6:1 for Hewlett-Packard. Google and Sears were not included in the interactive graphic because both CEOs are paid $1/yr. I have a hard time conceptualizing that the guy with the big office at CVS Caremark does anything valued 422x more than the overworked people who fill my prescription each month.
There’s a Glassdoor report from August with 2014 data for companies listed in the S&P 500, and if the thought of eating at Chipotle didn’t already make you ill, perhaps the knowledge that Head Burrito Man Steve Ells earned $28.9 million (or 1,522 times the median salary of $19,000) will do the trick. I don’t know what to DO with this information, but I do know that when Republicans tell me raising the minimum wage isn’t possible because it will destroy the economy, I can think of a few CEOs who almost singlehandedly can fund that increase and STILL have a million or so left to scrape by on.
I promise you that we here at Top Comments make no more than the median diarist is paid, and also that we give generously of our mojo in a share-the-wealth strategy many have called socialized mojo. Please support BeninSC, my formatting collaborator this evening, and I am without a doubt sure he will pay that mojo forward.
Brillig's ObDisclaimer: The decision to publish each nomination lies with the evening's Diarist and/or Comment Formatter. My evenings at the helm, I try reeeeallllyy hard to publish everything without regard to content. I really do, even when I disagree personally with any given nomination. "TopCommentness" lies in the eyes of the nominator and of you, the reader - I leave the decision to you. I do not publish self-nominations (ie your own comments) and if I ruled the world, we'd all build community, supporting and uplifting instead of tearing our fellow Kossacks down.
From Leu2500:
Starting with Gallifreyan Jedi’s comment, here, several Kossacks had fun in Chaoslillith's diary on CNN's priorities during Bernie Sanders's Wall St speech. (Ed. note: In other words, please read deeper in the thread!)
I have been laughing at NMDad's comment about a picture of J.E.B. wearing a hoodie for five minutes!
I really liked this comment by rbaillie, in Jen Hayden's diary on Ben Carson being confronted by a gay person, with a terrific link to a YouTube video interviewing people who ... are only just in the process of thinking it through!
With this comment, 6412093 added a few fine thoughts to UCRJames' diary regarding birders and the the occupation of a bird sanctuary by some right wing loons….
(First comments and tip jars excluded. Thank you mik for the mojo magic! For those of you interested in How Top Mojo Works, please see his diary on the subject!
2016-01-05 Top Comments with Pictures
(Courtesy of jotter!)