The highest-paid CEOs by state

Here are the top-paid CEOs by state for 2020, as calculated by The Associated Press and Equilar, an executive data firm.

The survey considered only publicly traded companies with more than $1 billion in revenue that filed their proxy statements with federal regulators between Jan. 1 and April 30. Not every state has such a company headquartered there. The survey includes only CEOs who have been in place for at least two years, but it does not limit the survey to companies in the S&P 500, as the AP’s general compensation study does. READ MORE

EEOC: Employers Can Offer Vaccine Incentives to Employees

With COVID-19 vaccine rollout well underway in the United States — a reported 50% of Americans are fully vaccinated — employers are increasingly welcoming employees back to the office. However, vaccine hesitancy is still prevalent in the country, which has caused some organizations to flirt with the idea of incentivizing those workers to receive their shots.

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission weighed in on the matter on Friday in its updated guidance, which stated that employers can offer bonuses and other incentives to encourage employees to get the COVID-19 vaccine. This guidance brings clarity to what was considered a legal gray area during the pandemic. READ MORE

Painting a Pay Equity Picture for the Board and Shareholders

It’s no secret that most companies, especially those that are public, are increasing their efforts to achieve workplace equity. Whether it’s through tying diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives to executive compensation, improving employee well-being or simply ensuring that all employees are compensated fairly across race, gender and ethnicity — a positive shift is no doubt underway.

WorldatWork’s Workplace Equity Virtual Forum May 19-20 explored all of these areas, including how HR and total rewards pros should approach the board and investors about the topic of pay equity. READ MORE

Is a CEO Worth 1,000 Times the Median Worker?

Chipotle recently became the latest company to voluntarily raise worker pay, announcing that many of its 76,000 hourly employees would get a bump to $15 an hour. This occurred shortly after the company disclosed that CEO Brian Niccol had made nearly 3,000 times the median employee salary in 2020, up from 1,136 times in 2019 and among the top ten highest pay ratios among companies in the Russell 3000 stock index, according to research firm Equilar.

Coincidence? Or is the pay bump for the rank and file a sign that the most highly compensated senior executives are starting to feel a tinge of shame? READ MORE

Tim Cook only ranks 171/500 in CEO pay and compensation table

The WSJ has published its annual ranking of CEO pay and compensation packages for S&P 500 companies, and Apple’s Tim Cook only takes 171st place despite AAPL sitting at the top of the index by company worth.

Standard and Poor’s 500 (S&P 500) ranks US companies by market capitalization, putting AAPL in first place with its value of more than 2 trillion dollars …

Indeed, AAPL makes up almost 6% of the total value of the top 500 US companies, but this isn’t reflected in CEO Tim Cook’s salary and performance-related pay. READ MORE

Wanted: Millions of cybersecurity pros. Salary: Whatever you want

A series of major digital security breaches over the past year are serving as a wake-up call to Corporate America about the need to invest in cybersecurity.

Friday brought yet another reminder of the risk of cyberattacks, when Microsoft (MSFT) said the hackers behind the 2020 Solar Winds breach launched a new attack on more than 150 government agencies, think tanks and other organizations globally. READ MORE

Female CEOs saw ranks dwindle in 2020; median pay fell 2 percent

Most of the women running the biggest U.S. companies saw their pay increase last year, even as the pandemic hammered the economy and many of their businesses.

Despite those gains, however, the median pay for female chief executives actually fell in 2020. Already a small group, they saw several high-profile women leave their ranks last year. That means changes in pay for only a few helped skew the overall figures, highlighting just how slow diversity has been to catch on in Corporate America's corner offices. READ MORE

Personal income plunges as stimulus check boost fades, inflation runs hot

Personal income tumbled in April as the prior month’s boost from stimulus checks waned and inflation ran hotter than expected. 

Personal income declined 13.1% month over month, less than the 14.1% decline that economists surveyed by Refinitiv were anticipating. Incomes surged by a downwardly revised record 20.9% in March as the government sent out $1,400 checks to most Americans.  READ MORE

CEO pay climbed 5 percent last year: report

CEOs of the country’s biggest companies in 2020 experienced a total average pay increase of 5 percent from the previous year, even as the coronavirus pandemic fueled immense losses for businesses across the globe, according to an analysis published by The Associated Press. 

The AP reported Friday that based on analysis from corporate leadership data firm Equilar, the median total compensation for executives in 2020 was $12.7 million, marking a record high in the firm's nearly 10-year history of collecting data on annual CEO compensation.  READ MORE

Unexpected Winners In McDonald’s Compensation Clawback Fight With Its Former CEO

In the fall of 2019, McDonald’s fired its CEO, Stephen Easterbrook (Easterbrook). The reason for the termination was that he violated company policy when he had a consensual sexual relationship with a McDonald’s employee. 

Despite firing Easterbrook for violating company policy, McDonald’s fired him “without cause.” This meant he would receive a significant severance package, with a potential value of more than $41 million. READ MORE

Financial Rewards: What Does Research Tell Us?

Financial rewards are a major component of virtually every employer’s value proposition. People establish their standard of living based on the size and the stability of their income stream. The disruption the pandemic has caused has interrupted that stream for people who have lost their employment or have been furloughed. Governmental support has temporarily addressed this loss to varying degrees. But the destabilizing impact of the pandemic has put a spotlight on financial rewards and highlighted the importance of their continuity. READ MORE

Kroger CEO: Why every company should incentivize employees to get the Covid-19 vaccine

This past year called for many of us to meet the greatest challenge of our lifetimes. Covid-19 changed how we live, when and how we see our friends and family, where we work and even how we shop.

At Kroger, it has changed how we approach nearly every aspect of our business. We had to reimagine selling groceries, because it wasn't just about the groceries anymore. It was about safeguarding our nearly half a million associates and 11 million daily customers; managing our ever-changing and often challenged supply chain; and accelerating our e-commerce services to provide fresh food through low-touch or no-touch shopping. READ MORE

A pay cut to work from home? Many employees would take it

Remote work is not going away any time soon — and many workers would be willing to take an average pay cut of 7% to work from home two or three days a week.

The in-depth look at remote work after the Covid-19 pandemic comes from the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute for Economics, which found about 21% of total work hours post-pandemic will be from home — a huge increase from 5% before the pandemic. READ MORE

Investors object to CEO pay in judgment on pandemic response

Rejections of executive pay packages in shareholder votes mandated by the Dodd-Frank Act more than a decade ago reached a record high this month as investors judge how CEOs handled the coronavirus pandemic.

Companies’ decisions to exclude COVID-19’s business impact when finalizing the size of bonuses and stock packages for their highest-paid executives are triggering more objections than ever, investor and pay consultants said. The widening divide between CEO and average worker earnings is also impacting how Wall Street views compensation. READ MORE

Retail investors are finally poised to take on stratospheric CEO pay

Wouldn’t it be great if you could say no to sky-high executive pay?

Turns out there’s an app for that. These days it’s as easy for retail shareholders to vote on CEO compensation as it is to order sushi on DoorDash. Just as brokerage apps have democratized investing, making stock and derivatives trading painlessly easy for everyday investors, so too has shareholder voting become almost effortless. READ MORE

The fastest way to fix a labor shortage: Pay more

For decades, worker compensation has been stagnant, while corporate profits make up an ever-increasing share of the economy.

The coronavirus pandemic has made the divide between employee and employer far more apparent. Covid disrupted the labor market in ways we have never seen: health worries, family obligations, hybrid-learning and child care shortages mean millions of workers remain on the sidelines. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a record 8.1 million job openings in March. READ MORE