Australia’s top 100 CEOs enjoyed a pay rise of nearly 13% in 2016-17, new data shows, over seven times the 1.8% wages growth of private sector workers that year. CEO pay growth was over 10% above inflation, while private sector workers went backwards by 0.1% compared to CPI.
The CEO pay data has been compiled by the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors and shows “realised pay” — which includes the realisation of gains from share options and other bonuses — and “reported pay”, which takes out the impact of share price movements that can artificially inflate or reduce the value of shares. Median reported pay for the CEOs of the top 100 ASX companies increased from $4,196,435 to $4,728,890, or 12.7%; average reported pay increased from $5,164,722 to $5,544,284, or 7.3%. Things were even better for CEOs of ASX 100-200 companies, who enjoyed increases on average of 22%.
Things weren’t as good for the top 10 CEOs, whose realised pay average just under $14 million, but who pay didn’t increase at all in average terms, despite big rises for Nicholas Moore of Macquarie and Louis Gries of James Hardy.
Over the five year period to 2017, top 100 CEO reported median pay growth was less spectacular, at 3.5% a year — which is still well ahead of private sector workers, who made do with 2.4% on average over that period. CEOs of ASX 100-200 companies had an average reported median pay growth of 3.3%.
Trickle up continues apace. Any sense of “trickle down” is merely the CEO’s & their Coalition lackeys peeing on us from a great height.
Actually not from a “great height” at all; indeed adjacent to one (because they are able to)!
It is axiomatic that the better off better off need to be lavishly compensated for deigning to do their vitally necessary tasks so vitally necessary to our necessarily vital economy whereas hoi polloi need to be paid as little as possible otherwise they will have no incentive to grease the cogs with their life blood, consume, shut & die, ASAP.
You won’t be told will you Bernie? I did suggest, quite some months ago, that a graph of OECD CEO salaries be superimposed over wages from circa 2000. I have undertaken the exercise but Crikey’s inept IT team/person refuses to permit .pdf or .jpg (or similar) files to be uploaded – quoting (idiotically) security issues. Such are easily incorporated into WordPress.
Failing the above suggestion consider six countries : Oz, NZ, USA, UK, Germany and Norway. The results are more or less similar albeit less extreme than in Oz, NZ, USA. Its hardly an Oz phenomena.