Corporate salary insanity - who earns $210,700 an hour?

Top 20 hedge fund managers averaged $657.5 million

Washington (3 Sept. 07) - How high can corporate salaries go? Top private-equity hedge fund managers were paid more for every 10 minutes on the job in 2006 than the average U.S. worker earned in the entire year.

The 20 highest-paid fund managers averaged $657.5 million (US) – 22,255 times the U.S. average annual salary of $29,500. That's $12.6 million a week, or $210,700 an hour (allowing for a 60-hour week), or $35,100 for every 10 minutes of work.

Put another way, the same managers were paid 3,315 times the average salary for the top 20 officials in the U.S. government's executive branch, including the U.S. president.

The figures are included in a joint study by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and United for a Fair Economy (UFE). Data for the study came from the U.S. Labour Department and Forbes magazine.

The study concludes that the absurd numbers will likely breed more of the same. Instead of shaming the corporate world to behave with more restraint, the opposite is likely to happen.

"The fact that these pay levels for fund managers are so out of sight is going to drive up pay at publicly-traded companies," says Sarah Anderson, co-author of the study. "There are people out there with a straight face claiming that public company executives are underpaid."

IPS is a Washington-based non-profit research group that promotes alternatives to the "corporate-driven approach to globalization." UFE, based in Boston, studies the negative impact that the concentration of wealth and power have on the economy and democracy.

NUPGE

The National Union of Public and General Employees (NUPGE) is one of Canada's largest labour organizations with over 340,000 members. Our mission is to improve the lives of working families and to build a stronger Canada by ensuring that our common wealth is used for the common good. NUPGE

More information:
The Staggering Social Cost of U.S. Business Leadership - pdf