Is your boss value for money?

The CBI recently revealed that the average chief executive today earns 81 times the average salary of their employees.

Do they earn it?

Are Chief Executive Officers value for money?

No. Executive pay is excessive.
Yes. Every penny.

Comments (if you want a link, include the website address and your email at the end)

The announcement came shortly before the news that Frank Chapman, CEO of BG Group, made £28m last year.

Operating profits for BG Group may have been down for the year (but still an impressive £4.1bn) and he certainly delivered value for shareholders with stock value increasing by 17% over the last 12 months.

If you work for a company returning those kind of figures, you may be pretty relaxed about your boss' salary. Under your CEOs leadership, you may have seen working conditions improve, had a pay rise and feel that both your career and the company's future is secure.

Then again, you might not be. Is it dispiriting to knock your pan in for a modest wage, working harder and longer, so that your CEO makes a huge pile of cash?

A Sales Assistant at M&S may earn £15,000 a year. Marc Bolland, the incoming CEO may earn £7m just for turning up on his first day.

No-one disputes that success should be rewarded.

In 2000, the average CEO earned 47 times the average salary of their employees. Now it is 81 times the average salary. Are CEOs almost twice as effective leaders as they were just 10 years ago? Are the companies they run making almost twice as much money? Are the rewards out of proportion to the success delivered?

your comments

"Because until the average 'Jo Blow' is really affected by the austerity that is creeping up on us, the working and lower-middle classes, people are surprisingly gullible and, sadly, stupid. Otherwise why would they take all this tripe the Coalition Government is telling them, wrapped up in lovely, soft PR spin and rhetoric? Since Clegg spun his sob story 'pity me, I'm only the fall guy - sob' I can't believe that people are coming out in the press saying they believe in him - PLEASE!!! They so quickly forget what a lying, turncoat bunch of twits sit in our Parliament in both the Coalition parties, who are supposed to be working for our benefit but who are going around with a wrecking-ball approach to practically everything. Yes, I do feel strongly about this topic but I equally feel I am a huge minority. WAKE BRITAIN and THINK! Don't sit there thinking that you're all right and you can get by or get hoodwinked that we are reliving the 30's - 40's 'Brave British Public' line that this Government is trying to feed you and wake up to the fact that they are in it for exactly what they and their Fat Cat friends in the City can gain for themselves - it's worse than you think!"

"It depends on the executive. Someone that builds a company from nothing to dominate their market in a couple of decades probably is worth more to that company than any number of ordinary workers (in the same way having a great general instead of an average one sometimes matters greatly). Executives as class though are not worth the money. "Didn't quite lead a billion dollar business into bankruptcy" shouldn't pay as well as it does (and it wouldn't if the owners were better organised). The adage is if you pay peanuts you get monkeys... but as we've seen in the last few years paying tonnes of peanuts still gets monkeys."

"The excuse given for high pay is that one has to pay that sort of money to get good chief execs. But is that true ? I doubt it."

"The executive pay is scandalous and unfortunately it's been driven as much by the labour government's attempts to cosy up to big business as anything the terrible Tories ever did. The whole argument about paying for quality is just hogwash - quite frankly the job most of these people do really isn't that difficult - it's mainly about working out new ways to screw more money out of other people for less in order to deliver 'shareholder value'. Ultimately most of these roles are entirely socially useless and pale into insignificance compared to that of say an NHS nurse, teacher or charity volunteer. If these self-serving arseholes truly believe their own press and can get a better deal in Switzerland, China or the US then let them piss off there, perhaps they can take a few premier league footballers and their agents with them. Sure we'll lose some tax income but maybe we'll see some upsides to, like genuine house price deflation, a rather less competitive cut throat country to live in and the return to a focus on quality of life for all not just shareholder value."