FTSE 100 chief executives are paid £3.4m on average, which works out at 103 times the £33,000 average salary for full-time UK workers

While hard-pressed families across the country continue to struggle during the cost of living crisis, and with public sector workers, including nurses and rail workers being offered below inflation pay rises, the country’s top CEO’s have seen their pay packets go up by 39%.

There doesn’t seem to be much concern among government ministers about the obscene profits or wage hikes given to those at the top of the economy, as they continue to ask ordinary workers to show ‘pay restraint’, claiming that above inflation pay increases will cause a wage-price spiral.

According to analysis by the High Pay Centre, a thinktank that campaigns for fairer pay for workers, the bosses of Britain’s biggest companies made more money in 2023 by last Thursday afternoon than the average UK worker will earn in the entire year.

FTSE 100 chief executives are paid £3.4m on average, which works out at 103 times the £33,000 average salary for full-time UK workers, according to Office for National Statistics figures.

The median pay packet of a FTSE 100 CEO is up 39% on January 2022, while the median worker’s pay has increased by only 6% over the same period.

Luke Hildyard, the director of the High Pay Centre, said: “In the worst economic circumstances that most people can remember, it is difficult to believe that a handful of top earners are still raking in such extraordinary amounts of money.

“The UK economy really cannot afford for such a big share of the wealth that is created by all workers to be captured by such a tiny number of people at the top. To address declining living standards for the majority, we need measures to balance the distribution of incomes more evenly.”

Basit Mahmood is editor of Left Foot Forward

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