by BARRY GRAY
While US unemployment remains at near-Depression levels and health care, pensions and education are being slashed by all levels of the government, the pay of corporate CEOs is soaring.
The compensation of the 200 highest-paid chief executives at large corporations increased by 23 percent in 2010 over the previous year, according to a report in Sunday’s New York Times.
Median pay for these individuals was $10.8 million, equivalent to the median pay of nearly 280 US workers.
The Times report was based on a survey conducted by the executive compensation firm Equilar. The company looked at CEO pay at companies with revenue of $10.78 billion or more.
Aaron Boyd, head of research at Equilar, told the Times that CEO compensation skyrocketed largely because many companies had resumed cash bonuses. These had been curtailed by some large firms at the height of the financial crisis in 2008 and 2009 as a temporary concession to public outrage over the government bailout of the banks and corporate greed.
Corporate America, it was said at the time, was making its executives more accountable by making more of their pay dependent on the performance of their companies. This was supposedly done by allotting more pay in the form of stock and stock options, rather than cash.
In fact, executives have reaped huge windfalls from stock granted when financial markets were at post-crash lows. The value of their shares has since skyrocketed in the stock market rally of the past two years.
Now the corporate elite has returned to cash, with bonuses rising 38 percent last year. Cash bonuses for the highest paid CEOs are now three times their pre-recession levels, according to a report released in June by GovernanceMetrics.
Phillipe Dauman of Viacom headed up the Times’ list with a compensation package of $84.5 million (equivalent to the median pay of over 2,100 American workers). He was joined by five other media CEOs in the top-ten category. These include Leslie Moonves, of the CBS Corporation, who got a 32 percent raise and took in $56.9 million; Michael White of DirecTV, who was paid $32.9 million; Brian L. Roberts of the Comcast Corporation and Robert A. Iger of the Walt Disney Company, each of whom received pay packages valued at $28 million.
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