Wage Gap Continues to Grow
Jan 04, 2012
The gap between Canada’s best-paid CEOs and the average Canadian worker continues to grow. A new report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has shown that it takes the average member of Canada’s top-paid chief executives a half-day of work to make the same amount of money ($44,366) as the average Canadian’s annual pay.
This is the fifth straight year that the CCPA has measured how long it takes for Canada’s richest chief executives to make the average Canadian’s annual salary. It’s numbers are from 2010 data. Last year’s report, based on information from 2009, showed that it took until 2:30 pm on the first working day of the year for the average top executive to earn the same.
The report also showed that Canada’s top executives earned an average of $8.4 million each in 2010, including salary, bonuses, stock grants and options. This is up a whopping 27 percent from the year previous.
On the other hand, the average Canadian worker actually earned less in 2010 than they did during the 2008-2009 recession once inflation is taken into account.
“The average of Canada’s CEO elite 100 make 189 times more than Canadians earning the average wage,” the report’s author, economist Hugh Mackenzie, said in a statement. “If you think that’s normal, it’s not. In 1998 the highest-paid 100 Canadian CEOs earned 105 times more than the average wage, itself likely more than double the figure for a decade earlier.”
The report also points out that inequality between Canada’s richest and the rest has been growing since the 1980s. This reversed a trend since the 1930s that saw increasing equality between the rich, middle-class and the poor.
The report can be accessed here.
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Its going to get alot worse than it is right now with people like me making a little more than medinum wage. I'm in a union and nothing is done for us, give someone else a raise and the people who really need araise don't get one. Its like working for nothing. Where is the fairness in that. Especially when there job is doing some of the work we do but they are paid at at higher rate.
sandra warren - 2012-01-10 16:46