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Most Brits think company bosses should be paid less, new survey finds
The survey found that some CEOs earn more than 100 times as much as the average employee
A new survey has revealed that a huge amount of Britons think company bosses shouldn’t be earning more than ten times the average paid to employees.
The poll – commissioned for High Pay Centre, a thinktank that campaigns for fairer pay for workers – found that 63% of 1,104 UK adults said chief executives should be paid no more than ten times the earnings of lower- or mid-ranking employees, The Guardian reports.
The survey also found that only 3% of people thought it was appropriate for chief executives to get paid more than fifty times the company’s average pay.
Previous research by High Pay Centre revealed that the bosses of 350 of the biggest UK-listed companies were being paid fifty-three times more than the median employee.
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And more shockingly, a total of forty-three bosses of FTSE 350 companies received more than 100 times as much as the average employee.
The highest paid FTSE 100 CEO in 2020 was Pascal Soriot, the chief executive of AstraZeneca, the pharmaceutical company that makes the Oxford Covid vaccine, with an annual salary of £15.5m.
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Other top earners included Experian’s Brian Cassin with earnings of £10.3m, CRH’s Albert Manifold with £10m and Berkeley’s Rob Perrins, who collected a total of £8m in 2020.
According to High Pay Centre, the average FTSE 100 chief executive makes more money in four days than the average UK worker earns in the entire year.
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56% of respondents said the best way to improve living standards for those living in the middle and at the bottom would be to introduce policies that ensure wealth is shared more evenly, while 33% said measures that increase economic growth would be best.
Luke Hildyard, the director of High Pay Centre, said the research has revealed ‘the extent to which the lives of those at the top and those of everybody else have become so far removed from each other’.
He said: “That’s probably not a healthy development. Britain’s biggest employers dedicate a significant amount of their budget to the pay of a small number of top earners.
“Redirecting some of this money to low- and middle-income workers would be a good way to raise living standards and address the cost of living crisis but it will require policymakers and business leaders to be a bit more open-minded about whether those at the top really need to be paid so much.”