Leading UK CEOs are earning between 12 and 14,000 times their own workers’ pay
It takes four days on average for a UK CEO to earn their frontline workers’ yearly salary
Shift and hourly workers who’ve kept businesses running are being overlooked in favour of higher executive pay.
The pay of some of the UK’s top CEOs has been thrown into the spotlight as many companies report record-breaking profits, despite increasing prices for customers and refusing to boost pay in line with soaring inflation.
A new tool lets you compare your own salary to that of some of the UK’s most well-known CEOs.
Simply pop in your salary to find out how much more than you they really earn.Jobs board Breakroom, which analysed pay data from 2021, found that while the average frontline worker at Royal Mail earned £11.75 per hour in 2021, company CEO Simon Thompson earned 26 times more, taking home a £596,000 salary. While CEO of BT Group Philip Jansen earned £2.63million, his frontline workers were paid 113 times less, taking home on average £11.90 per hour.
On average, it takes a UK CEO just four days to earn the salary of their frontline workers, Breakroom found.
The You vs a CEO tool also compares the salary of well-known CEOs with that of their own employees. The results are shocking with CEO earnings ranging from 12 to over 14,000 times that of their frontline hourly employees.
Breakroom looked at the 2021 earnings of CEOs from well-known companies and compared this with their data on the average frontline hourly workers’ pay from the same company to reveal how much higher the CEOs’ pay is. For example, Bet 365 CEO, Denise Coates took home a staggering £298,600,000 in 2021, meaning she was paid 14,244 times more than her own frontline workers.
NHS Chief Executive, Amanda Pritchard, took home £260,000, being paid 12 times more than her own workers’ pay.
Whilst, Simon Roberts the CEO of Sainsbury’s, who is currently under pressure to pay all staff the Real Living Wage, took home 202 times the average Sainsbury’s hourly workers’ pay.
Anna Maybank, Co-Founder and CEO of Breakroom, commented:
“Exorbitant CEO pay is one of the major contributors to rising inequality in the workplace, and it needs to be tackled.
Right now employers are facing the worst candidate shortage in history at the same time employees are facing a massive cost of living crisis.
No CEO should be earning hundreds or thousands of times their own workers’ pay and it’s unjustifiable that on average it takes just four days for a FTSE 100 CEO to earn the equivalent of a UK frontline worker’s annual salary.
CEO pay has bounced back post-covid but the pay for frontline staff who kept businesses operating during the pandemic have seen their pay flounder. Our members have told us that low pay mixed with the cost-of-living crisis is the number one reason they are currently looking to leave and change jobs. If businesses want to keep and attract talent they are going to have to start filtering down their profits to frontline workers.”
Breakroom has conducted the largest ever survey of over 300,000 UK frontline workers, asking them about the things that really matter to them, like pay, flexibility, team, and management. Using this data to produce an objective rating of more than 2,300 UK employers.
