As many Canadians nurse their post-New Year’s Eve hangovers and ponder what further economic storms await, Canada’s top corporate executives can take comfort in knowing they’ve already earned as much as the average worker will earn in all of 2009.
A new analysis by the left-leaning Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives concludes the country’s richest corporate executives will have pocketed an average of $40,237 by 9:04 a.m. Friday morning.
“By the time your computer has finished booting up on your first day back after the new year’s holiday, the average CEO would have already banked what took the average Canadian worker an entire year’s worth of work to earn,” the report states.
“Many of the top 100 include Canada’s big bank CEOs, who recently received billions in federal government bailout money to purchase mortgage loans.”
Prepared by economist Hugh Mackenzie, the report finds the top 100 CEOs of publicly traded corporations averaged more than $10 million in pay apiece in 2007, the last full year for which figures are available.
Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management, said the gap between low-end and highest-end earners began growing in earnest in the 1980s and accelerated in the 1990s, something Martin attributed essentially to greed.
Martin said current ways of thinking about CEO compensation are “dead wrong.”
