Executive Pay and Worker Wage

Yesterday I’ve read that the 100 highest paid CEO whose companies are listed on the S&P/TSX (Toronto Stock Exchange) composite index made an average of $ 8.38 million in 2010. It said that’s 189 times higher than the $ 44,366 an average Canadian full time worker made in 2010. It’s a sad new while the average worker’s wages fell comparing to 2009 data and the CEO compensation raise 27% from $ 6.6 million in 2009.

To understand more about these CEO pay and average worker wage, I look up at Wikipedia and I found out as follows:

Executive pay is financial compensation received by an officer of a firm, often as a mixture of salary, short term incentive (bonuses), long term incentive plans, shares of and/or call options on the company stock, employee benefits, paid expenses, and insurance.

Executive pay is an important part of corporate governance and is often determined by a company's board of directors.

An average worker's wage is the mean salary of a group of workers. This measure is often monitored and used by government or other organization as a benchmark for the wage level of individual workers in an industry, area or country.

I also found out some information about average CEO pay and average worker pay in some countries (year between 2009 and 2010).

Country	CEO Salary/yr (Can$)	Worker Salary/yr	Times higher
Canada	$ 8.38 million	$ 44,366	189
USA	$ 11.5 million	$ 33,910	300
Britain	$ 4.3 million	$ 52,039	83
Europe	$ 6.6 million	$ 35,257	187
Japan	$ 1.5 million	$ 45,180	34
China	$ 631,700	$  3,600	175
Indonesia	$ 295,000	$  2,125	139

Sources: Wikipedia, MSN Money, Forbes, Payscale

This article is not meaning to disagree with the amount of executive pay, but this issue proved that the richest gained more rich and there is a big gap between the CEO pay and average worker wage.