Mind the gap: What do CEO-to-worker pay ratios really reveal?
Mind the gap: What do CEO-to-worker pay ratios really reveal?
Publicly traded companies already have to report how much their CEOs earn. The Securities and Exchange Commission now has proposed a rule requiring them to disclose how much more that is than the median employee pay.
The pay-ratio idea gained strength after the financial crisis and was included in the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation. Companies don’t like pay ratios, saying they’re complicated and expensive to calculate.
That argument has some merit. But even if someone finds an easy way to do the math, companies worry that the resulting rankings — lumping together very different kinds of businesses — won’t be fair.
“Retail, supermarkets and things like that, you’re going to have a lot of workers that are paid at a fairly low level. It’s just the nature of that business,” says Dave Larcker, a Stanford professor who studies corporate pay. “That ratio, generally speaking, is going to be quite high.”
A Bloomberg analysis this year showed that JPMorgan Chase and Chipotle Mexican Grill had similar CEO pay packages, about $19 million, but completely different pay ratios: 229:1 and 778:1, respectively. That’s because rank-and-file bankers make a lot more than burrito rollers. (The average multiple for S&P 500 companies was 204, according to Bloomberg, and the pay gap has been rising.)
Whole industries could look bad. But University of Denver law professor Jay Brown says concern about the public images of companies misses the point.
“While maybe other people can take it out of context and use it for different reasons, the reality is securities laws are designed to inform shareholders,” he says. “This information is useful in making an informed decision when they vote on executive compensation.”
Brown thinks pay ratios are most useful not for comparing companies to each other, but viewed over time to track how individual companies change pay packages.
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