CEO pay soars while workers’ pay stalls

From USA TODAY:

At a time most employees can barely remember their last substantial raise, median CEO pay jumped 27% in 2010 as the executives’ compensation started working its way back to pre-recession levels, a USA TODAY analysis of data from GovernanceMetrics International found. Workers in private industry, meanwhile, saw their compensation grow just 2.1% in the 12 months ended December 2010, says the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Median CEO pay in 2010 was $9.0 million, based on 158 Standard & Poor’s 500 index companies with the same CEO serving all of 2009 and 2010 that have reported CEO pay, according to the USA TODAY analysis of data from GovernanceMetrics based on proxies that have already been filed.

The median amount that CEOs actually took home — which includes salary and cash bonuses, as well as stock and options awarded in previous years that vested or were cashed in — was $8.6 million. That’s the most CEOs have pulled down since the median of $9.2 million in 2007, according to GovernanceMetrics’ analysis of S&P 500 companies…

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