The Pay at the Top-CEO pay for 200 companies (NYT)

[underpants]

http://projects.nytimes.com/executive_compensation?ref=business



The compensation research firm Equilar compiled data reflecting pay for 200 chief executives at 198 public companies that filed their annual proxies by March 27 and had revenue of at least $6.3 billion. (Two companies, Motorola and Synnex, had co-C.E.O.’s.)


Family Dollar Stores Howard R. Levine 4.1 Million

Costco Wholesale James D. Sinegal 3.8 Million

Winn-Dixie Stores Peter L. Lynch 2.9 Million There are still Winn-Dixie's?

L-3 Communications Michael T. Strianese 12.4 Million
L-3 had the SIXTH most revenue as a contractor in Iraq during 2004 - 2006
http://www.reuters.com/article/marketsNews/idINN2060036120071120

[imdjh]

1. Sort them by lowest pay. It's the most interesting part. nt

[ThePantaloon.com]

2. What about profitable versus bankrupt?

I'd like to see stats of salaries for CEOs of zombie banks and failing companies...

[Sarah Ibarruri]

3. The cult of CEOs is sickening

Business philosophy and studies has instilled in everyone the idea that somehow CEOs are brilliant, that they're superior, that losing them is a brain drain. It's bs and lies.

[CurtEastPoint]

4. Did you notice Warren Buffett almost at the bottom w/200K?

Now that's class.

[hankthecrank]

5. can't even spend that kind of money

but we can't give little people a raise because we can ship their jobs overseas

guess the french had the right plan for this

[bluedeminredstate]

6. Interesting.

The article shows a chart that has info on each CEO - the CEO's salary, whether that was an increase from the year before and a couple other business-y things. The last category is the percentage of company growth for the year.
You'd think with these guys pulling in salaries of 5 million, 14 million, 10 million, that the percentage of company growth would be substantial since these guys are obviously being paid mega-millions for their unique expertise, right?

Well, not exactly. To be fair there were some CEOs who actually presided over some percentage of growth in their companies, thus "earning" their obscene compensation. However, the chart is full of CEO's who were paid enormous salaries - multi-millions - while their companies had, for example -75%, -47%. -89% growth from the previous year. It looked like there were way more "losing" CEOs than ones that presided over their companies during a period of growth.

I know the economy sucks everywhere and lots of companies are having terrible losses compared to other years so I don't blame these CEOs entirely for every single bit of these company losses. BUT shouldn't these companies and CEOs be performing successfully before the CEOs line up like pigs at the trough, taking ridiculous amounts of money for themselves? Shouldn't performance matter when it comes to the kind of money these guys are making? There's something very wrong with a CEO making 5, 10, 20 million dollars when a company is performing poorly.

I can't think of any type of job in any kind of business where an employer would pay an employee a very generous salary regardless of how they do the job and then continue to substantially increase their pay despite poor performance. Where in the world would that ever happen except in corporate America where CEOs make huge, obscene amounts of money no matter how well or poorly they perform.
It's so wrong, so unfair, so unjust and so common that we all just accept it as normal.