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Money can’t literally buy happiness. But it can buy safety, security and experiences that make life more joyful and less stressful.
Americans say it would take a lot of money — upwards of $230,000 a year — to feel secure, and even more — $483,000 — to feel rich, according to a recent Bankrate survey. But new data shows they may find happiness earning far less. READ MORE
America's working women were feared to suffer the worst in the pandemic recovery. The opposite, however, has proven to be the case, with women serving as historic drivers of a labor market that remains surprisingly strong.
Why it matters: The pay gap between full-time working women and male counterparts is now the narrowest on record. The dynamic has been long in the making — a reflection of discrimination's slow fade and other structural forces that have held women back on pay. READ MORE
Siobhan Neela-Stock learned a painful lesson about the need for mental health support in the workplace when she found herself in the midst of an acute breakdown one morning back in August 2021.
The Vermont-based writer and journalist had endured months of prolonged stress from her work environment. Eventually, she reached a point where it was hard to get out of bed. By the time she decided to take a six-week mental health leave from her media job, she was finding it difficult to sleep or even string a sentence together. READ MORE
Young workers are going all in with salary transparency, whether they’re sharing how much they’re paid with social media followers or co-workers and friends in real life. And Charlotte Chaze, 32, a Philadelphia-based tech worker took it another step further: She recently posted the salaries of all of her previous jobs to her LinkedIn profile. READ MORE
Money is a fantastic motivator for those looking for a new job and traditionally, software developers have been well-compensated and in-demand.
The pandemic sent their earning power soaring to dizzy new heights as businesses and organizations embraced digitisation, undertook extensive digital transformation projects or moved to the cloud. READ MORE
Southeastern Conference Commissioner Greg Sankey made clear Monday that only Congress can truly set a national standard for name, image and likeness compensation in college athletics.
Sankey said NIL isn’t a partisan issue and that state legislatures haven’t yet enforced their NIL laws, some of which would bar the NCAA and conferences from adopting and enforcing their own standards. READ MORE
Tesla Inc. directors, including Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk, agreed to return more than $735 million in stock awards and cash to settle an investor lawsuit accusing board members of improperly giving themselves massive compensation packages.
The directors — including Oracle Corp. founder Larry Ellison; James Murdoch, son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch; and Musk’s brother, Kimbal Musk — agreed to hand over the stock grants and cash for already exercised options, along with making corporate-governance changes to the way board-level compensation issues are reviewed, according to court filings. READ MORE
The best leadership drives the best performance.
In 2017, Lionel Messi signed the largest sports contract in history — a four-year agreement valued at $673,919,105 with FC Barcelona. It averaged out to $3.7M per game, but the size of the contract reflected something more. It reflected the leadership that the organization expected Messi to provide, from team chemistry all the way through to team marketing and revenue. This year, Messi signed a new contract, with a new team — now including team equity and a cut of the revenue from streaming and merchandise. READ MORE
The median total compensation at Google in 2022 was $279,802 — but which roles raked in the highest salaries?
Insider obtained an internal company spreadsheet that was shared among Google employees. The sheet includes salary data for more than 12,000 US-based employees in 2022 and covers a range of roles, including software engineers and business analysts. READ MORE
As ESG investing has boomed, so has a movement to tie executive compensation to environmental, social, and governance goals such as reducing carbon emissions, diversifying the workplace, and improving corporate culture. Like all things ESG-related, this has sparked skepticism and controversy. Are these incentives and bonuses driving CEOs to meet ambitious goals or are they just another way to pad compensation packages? READ MORE
Stock repurchases (or “buybacks”) — where a company uses excess cash flow to repurchase shares of its stock to reduce common shares outstanding — have attracted significant attention from journalists, academic researchers, and government regulators; the concept of repurchases has also accrued significant supporters and detractors. According to Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Chair Gary Gensler, “In 2021, buybacks amounted to nearly $950 billion and reportedly reached more than $1.25 trillion in 2022”. [1] In 2023, the SEC revised rules issued in 1982 governing buybacks to require quarterly reporting of daily officer and director stock transactions that occur during a period of a stock repurchase program in addition to narrative disclosure of the details of the company’s buyback program and trading policies applicable during the program. The new regulations are intended to increase transparency of buyback processes and executive stock transactions during such programs. This Viewpoint summarizes Pay Governance research on buybacks within the S&P 500, the impact of buybacks on incentive compensation, and recent regulations governing buybacks. READ MORE
Frequently during the financial crisis, the COVID pandemic, and now in a rising interest rate environment, we see startup and early-stage growth companies that, in the effort to conserve cash, reduce or eliminate the pay of the founders and senior executives for some period of time. While this step is logical and critical to the company achieving long-term success, it is fraught with potential adverse consequences under Internal Revenue Code section 409A (“section 409A”).
This article is intended to be a general overview of the issues that arise and the proactive and mitigating strategies that may be applied to avoid the harsh tax consequences to the employee when violations of section 409A occur. READ MORE
When it comes to paid time off from work, America doesn’t have the best reputation. Last year, researchers named the U.S. one of the worst countries in the world for giving employees paid leave.
American workers get an average of 10 paid days off per year, according to careers site Zippia. While this increases slightly after five years with the same employer, it’s still far less than workers in other parts of the world are entitled to—often by law. READ MORE
Employer compensation costs for private industry workers averaged $40.79 per hour worked in March 2023. Private industry compensation costs were $15.91 at the 10th percentile, $30.26 at the 50th percentile (median), and $78.42 at the 90th percentile. READ MORE
In 1933, the U.S. government asked 2,000 corporations listed on stock exchanges in New York to disclose how much they paid their top bosses — its first effort at making the pay of executives more visible. The idea was to encourage the “more conservative management of industry,” The New York Times reported when it published some of the results on its front page. READ MORE
It seems to be the season for talking about CEO pay—especially the ratio of CEO to more typical employee pay. It’s not clear why that is happening now—possibly a slow news time—but nevertheless, the topic is making headlines, with the operative questions being, why does CEO pay keep going up and does it matter what that ratio is? READ MORE
The average salary in the United States is close to $100,000, but don’t be fooled, as the vast majority of Americans earn much less. Less than 20 percent of individuals say that they earn a six-figure-plus salary according to Zippia, and slightly more than a third of households.
And of those that do, the number that feel that they live paycheck-to-paycheck has been increasing, jumping seven points in just one year to 45 percent in 2022. One of the main factors is the cost of living which varies across the nation generally more expensive on the East and West coasts and in major metropolitan areas in between. READ MORE
The work can be demanding and full of stress. But you get paid more than everybody else — vastly more, as the latest numbers remind us.
We know how much more bosses are paid because every year, thanks to the Dodd-Frank law of 2010, publicly traded American companies must reveal to their shareholders a trove of information about the compensation of top executives. What’s more, companies must compare the rich earnings of their leaders with the pay of ordinary workers. READ MORE
Some drivers for Walmart's delivery platform Spark say there's a growing problem on the app involving users who deploy bots to hoard orders and make it harder for other drivers to get deliveries.
A group of drivers who said they had been affected by the prevalence of bots in their area held a demonstration in front of a Walmart Supercenter in Cicero, Illinois, on Thursday, as reported by the Chicago Tribune. READ MORE