CEO Value

How much more is a CEO worth than the rest of the workforce?

Luke Hildyard, the director of the High Pay Centre, which campaigns for executive pay restraint, said: “Pay for top CEOs today is about 120 times that of the typical UK worker. Estimates suggest it was around 50 times at the turn of the millennium or 20 times in the early 1980s.”

The online supermarket Ocado has been singled out as having the biggest pay gap between those at the top and those on the shop floor.

Its chief executive, Tim Steiner, was paid £58.7m in 2019 , which works out at 2,605 times the £22,500 paid to the online grocery delivery company’s staff on average. It means Steiner was paid about 10 times as much as the average Ocado worker’s annual salary for just one day’s work.

Apparently, in the UK anyway, one CEO does more work and delivers more value than 2,605 average delivery staff. How is that even possible?