Since this Thursday, January 4, 2024, 1 p.m., the remuneration of the directors of the hundred best-listed British companies on the London Stock Exchange has exceeded the equivalent of the country’s annual median salary. This calculation has been carried out since 2014 by the British think tank High Pay Center (HPC) which named the day of its publication as “fatcat day”. To do this, the left-leaning think tank examines the financial reports of FTSE 100 companies every year and compares the data collected with government statistics.
Results: “The median salary for FTSE 100 CEOs (excluding pension) is currently £3.81 million (around €4.42 million), 109 times the median salary for a time worker full of 34,963 pounds sterling (around 40,541 euros),” specifies the HPC. Thus, it would have only taken two and a half days of work for the bosses to earn as much as half of the employees in a year.
If the High Pay Center adds that the remuneration of bosses has increased by 9.5% since last March, compared to only 6% for the media salary of workers, we must keep in mind that these estimates are lagging behind. The bosses’ remunerations considered are those of 2022 since the companies’ annual reports present the figures for last year. The think tank isn’t just singling out CEOs. Thanks to “other publicly available data” not detailed, the HPC estimates that “in the United Kingdom, the richest 1% of employees, earning at least £145,000 per year (around 168,134 euros), will have exceeded the annual salary of the median worker by March 29.
