Individual income taxes are a major source of state government revenue, accounting for 38 percent of state tax collections.[1] Their prominence in public policy considerations is further enhanced in that individuals are actively responsible for filing their income taxes, in contrast to the indirect payment of sales and excise taxes. READ MORE
Walmart just boosted pay to $15. It's not what you think
Walmart announced pay bumps Thursday that will bring its average hourly wage to over $15 an hour. But the move still falls short of the $15 minimum wage announced by some of its largest competitors.
Walmart, America's largest private employer, said it will raise wages for 425,000 US workers -- more than a fourth of its workforce -- to at least $13 an hour. READ MORE
Executive compensation: 2021 and beyond
COVID-19 is causing “unprecedented, negative economic impacts in an accelerated fashion,” comments Alvarez & Marsal.
“Many experts, furthermore, believe that the coronavirus crisis is just getting started, and that the countermeasures that are causing such negative economic impacts may last not for weeks, but for months or longer. Whether engaged in the airline, hotel, restaurant, physical fitness, cruise line, retail, oil and gas, or any other industry, significant impacts will flow through all sectors, with few, if any, insulated from the downturn.” READ MORE
How to design CEO pay to punish iniquity, not just reward virtue
IF BUSINESS HAD a Moses, “Thou shalt link pay to performance” would be on his tablet. Compensation committees have, however, tended to stick to a narrow reading of the commandment. Whereas they reward good behavior, deterring the bad is an afterthought. Worried that this may lead bosses to adopt a mentality of “heads we win, tails shareholders lose”, boards are rethinking their priorities—partly in response to pressure from regulators and investors, but also to shifting social winds. Perfectly balanced incentives remain as elusive as the promised land. Still, measures designed to ensure that misconduct does not pay are becoming central to the debate about how to craft bosses’ salary plans. READ MORE
Gender pay gap persists even at executive level, new study finds
Even women who climb their way to corporate America's highest ranks are paid less than their male counterparts, new research confirms.
The highest-paid senior executive women earned 84.6 cents for every dollar earned by their male counterparts in 2019, according to a study of corporate disclosures released Wednesday by Morningstar Inc., a financial services research firm. READ MORE
A critical look at pandemic-related executive compensation changes
With the 2021 proxy season underway, a new analysis reveals some telling findings as to what impact proxy advisory firm Institutional Shareholder Services will have on say-on-pay concerning executive compensation actions made in response to the coronavirus pandemic. READ MORE
Kroger will close more stores over hazard pay laws for workers
Kroger will close two stores in Seattle over the city's $4-an-hour hazard pay requirement for grocery workers, an escalation of the grocery chain's push against newly-passed hazard pay laws growing on the West Coast. READ MORE
Biden’s $15 wage proposal: Job killer or a boon for workers?
President Joe Biden’s effort to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour could provide a welcome opportunity for someone like Cristian Cardona, a 21-year-old fast food worker. Cardona would love to earn enough to afford to move out of his parents’ house in Orlando, Florida, and maybe scrape together money for college.
More than 1,000 miles away in Detroit, Nya Marshall worries that a $15 minimum wage would drive up her labor costs and perhaps force her to close her 2-year-old restaurant, already under strain from the viral pandemic. READ MORE
Insiders at COVID-19 vaccine makers sold nearly $500M of stock last year
IRS Clarifies Tax on Executive Pay at Nonprofit Organizations
The Department of the Treasury and the IRS published a final rule on Jan. 19 to help tax-exempt not-for-profit organizations comply with the excise tax on pay considered to be excessive under Section 4960 of the Internal Revenue Code (IRC). READ MORE
How performance-based pay can drive up executive compensation
An increasing focus on performance-based pay and long-term incentives is driving up CEO salaries in japan.
In fiscal year 2019 alone, CEOs saw total pay jump by a huge 20.5 percent, according to a study by Willis Towers Watson (WTW), published at the end of last year. This was, say the study authors, ‘driven by a significant expansion of long-term incentives’ in Japanese pay structures. It also represents a huge jump on the 3.3 percent rise the year before. READ MORE
Bezos Reclaims Title of World’s Richest After Musk Slips
Elon Musk’s reign as the the world’s richest person was brief.
Tesla Inc. shares slid 2.4% on Tuesday, erasing $4.6 billion from its chief executive officer’s fortune and knocking him from the top spot on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index ranking. READ MORE
GE Is Blasted for Revamping Culp’s Pay Package Amid Struggles
A labor-affiliated investor group blasted General Electric Co. for approving a restructured compensation plan last year that lowered the bar for Chief Executive Officer Larry Culp to potentially collect more than $230 million.
The manufacturer has faced a performance and operational crisis due to “years of poor board oversight,” CtW Investment Group Executive Director Dieter Waizenegger said Tuesday in a letter to GE director Risa Lavizzo-Mourey. The group called on GE’s board to permanently separate the CEO and chairman roles and refrain from re-nominating the five members of the executive compensation committee for approving the pay plan. READ MORE
Evidence-Based Performance Management
Performance management is one of the most talked about and written about topics within talent management. Periodically, the practitioner literature contains numerous articles about “new” strategies for doing performance management effectively. Despite that, it is one of the two elements of talent management that are viewed most negatively by both employees and managers. Rewards management is the other. READ MORE
Thinking Through COVID Vaccine Incentives
There’s a segment of the population that doesn’t believe in the medical advantages of vaccinations.
A 2019 Gallup survey, for instance, found that 11% of 1,025 American adults actually consider vaccines to be more dangerous than the diseases they’re intended to prevent. READ MORE
Bumble's billionaire... at just 31
Dating app Bumble’s founder has become a billionaire at 31.
Whitney Wolfe Herd’s wealth jumped from £362million to £1.1billion as her firm celebrated a stellar first-day trading performance on Wall Street, with shares soaring nearly 80 per cent on their stock market debut. READ MORE
Behavioral Economics in Compensation Strategy
Behavioral economics research can teach us many ways that our compensation programs can be more effective.
The findings can also make us wiser in our day-to-day work. Some of the findings verify long-held beliefs but many more are counterintuitive. So if we remain unaware of the research findings, we will literally be less effective than we can be. Not a great foundation for a compensation practice! Especially since there are numerous findings that should be applied to plan design. READ MORE
Amazon endorses $15 minimum wage bill despite CBO projections that 1.4M jobs could be cut by 2025
Amazon recently endorsed the Raise the Wage Act, a bill co-authored by Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Patty Murray, D-Wa., and Congressman Bobby Scott, D-Va., which would incrementally increase the federal minimum wage from $7.25 per hour to $15 per hour by 2025. READ MORE
Executive Bonuses Might Work Better Than You Think
Executive compensation continues to be large and, in many cases, controversial.
But do the bonus packages offered to top corporate managers work as intended — and if so, how? READ MORE
How climate change can be addressed through executive compensation
Environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues are increasingly becoming incorporated across all aspects of organizations, including business strategies, operations and product/service offerings.
Recent global research of boards of directors by Willis Towers Watson found that 70 to 80 percent of respondents have identified ESG priorities and developed ESG implementation plans. However, only 48 percent have fully incorporated ESG into their businesses, indicating that organizations are at different stages in their ESG journeys. While the most cited reason for taking ESG actions is that they see it as the right thing to do, over three-quarters (78 percent) of respondents indicate that they believe ESG is a key contributor to strong financial performance. READ MORE