Top bosses need only to work three days to 'earn' the average UK wage

It’s definitely the season to be jolly if you’re a Chief Executive Officer of a top company. Yesterday was ‘Happy Fat Cat Thursday’. And, it was reported that by the fourth day of 2018 that the bloated ‘earnings’ of top CEOs had reached the average UK pay of £28,758 – though ‘earnings’ is a very questionable term here.

  

Basically, CEO’s of the UK’s largest firms were paid on average £4.5 million each last year (all figures sourced from the High Pay Centre and HR industry body the CIPD).

The High Pay Centre calculates that the average chief executive earns 120 times more than the average employee working full-time. The calculation is based on executives working a 12-hour day, weekends and taking 19 days holiday per annum.

Using these calculations, in order to reach median full-time employee’s annual salary, top bosses need only to work 32 hours.

How can one person within any organisation be valued 120 times greater than that of the average worker’s full-time earnings? Sure, a CEO may work a longer week than the average worker, but working a 60+ hour week, this still cannot merit such a differentiation in pay.

As rich CEO’s tuck away scores of thousands of pounds each week, so some of their employees are forced to queue up for sustenance at food banks, face eviction, sofa surf from friend to friends’ homes. The wealth gap in 21 century UK continues to widen. It grows as the news of a royal wedding is lapped up by the gormless who refuse to rail against the obscenity of homeless people freezing to death on our streets.

There will be a demonstration organised by the TUC in March this year. We must come out in our millions to voice our anger at the growing poverty in the UK. Let’s frighten Theresa May into calling another General Election; and then vote in a progressive Labour government.