Britain’s fat cat bosses will have made more by lunchtime today than the average worker will earn in a year.
Chief executives of FTSE 100 companies are paid a median average of £3.45m a year, which works out at 120 times the £28,758 collected by full-time UK workers on average.
On an hourly basis the bosses will have earned more in less than three working days than the average employee will pick up this year, leading campaigners to dub the day “Fat Cat Thursday”.
With in-work poverty on the rise the analysis by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) puts the spotlight on the scale of inequality currently gripping the nation.
Frances O’Grady, the TUC general secretary, said it was outrageous that bosses were picking up “salaries that look like telephone numbers” while workers were “suffering the longest pay squeeze since Napoleonic times”.
Tim Roache, the general secretary of the GMB union, said the pay gap between bosses and workers was “simply obscene”.
“Does anyone really think these fat cats deserve 100 times more than the hard-working people who prop up their business empires?” he said. “Workers who have to scrimp and save to feed their families and put a roof over their head – and like most of Britain’s working population will now be feeling the pinch after the festive period?”
Roache said the prime minister had failed in her promise to tackle excessive executive pay: “Last year Theresa May broke her pledge to guarantee worker representation on company boards, a move which would have helped shed light on corporate excess and redress the balance towards fairer pay.”
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