This year it took them an hour less than last year. Thursday January 4, 2024, at 1 p.m., the bosses of the FTSE 100, the top hundred listed companies in the United Kingdom, have already earned the equivalent of the country’s annual median salary.
The calculation is carried out by the British think tank High Pay Centre, which campaigns against pay inequality. This is based on the median remuneration of the managing directors of these multinationals, which is currently 3.81 million pounds (4.4 million euros). Comparing it to the British median salary, which is 34,963 pounds (40,500 euros), she concludes that it took them around two and a half working days to earn as much as an employee in a year.
The comparison is obviously far from perfect. The bosses’ salaries are noted in the 2023 annual reports of companies, and therefore concern their 2022 remuneration. Furthermore, the number of hours worked by managers is questionable: the High Pay Center chose to take 62.5 hours per week , based on a Harvard study.
But the think tank’s aim is simply to warn about the scale of pay disparities: currently, FTSE 100 bosses receive 109 times the median salary.
“Erroneous opinion”
“Lobbyists for big business and financial services spent much of 2023 arguing that top salaries in the UK were not high enough (…), annoys Luke Hildyard, the director of the High Pay Center. They believe that economic success is created by a very few people at the top and that the rest contribute little. When politicians listen to this kind of misguided opinion, it’s no surprise that we end up with huge inequalities. »
High Pay Center also made the comparison with other big pay companies in the country. For bosses of the FTSE 350, another stock market index which includes a wider range of listed companies, they must wait until January 10 to receive the equivalent of the median salary. The partners of the five main law firms reach this sum from January 8. As for the bankers of the five major British banks, they must wait until January 16 on average.
However, although wage inequality exploded from the 1980s in the United Kingdom, and very high salaries continued to rise until the mid-2010s, the gap now seems to be shrinking. In 2014, the High Pay Center calculated that a FTSE 100 boss earned 148 times the median salary. In 2020, it was 117 times. Today, it’s “only” 109 times.