FATCATS ON £4.3M A YEAR, LOWEST ON £14K BOSSES’ PAY UP £12.74 TWICE AS FAST
THE world’s most famous waterfall freezes at its edges yesterday as temperatures at Niagara Falls plummet to minus 13 degrees.
Giant icicles formed as waters froze on the brink of the 57m-drop Horseshoe Falls, the largest of the three, on the US Canadian border.
It wasn’t as cold as 1912, when the smaller American Falls froze to a trickle. Still, visitors had to just wrap up – and go with the floe. FATCAT bosses’ salaries have soared at twice the rate for workers on the minimum wage.
Today’s lowest pay rate would be £12.74 an hour – £26,000 a year – if it had kept pace with pay increases of chief executives in Britain’s top 100 companies.
That would mean an e extra £ 11,835 a year for workers aged 25 or older on 40 hours per week.
The startling difference h has been revealed by the union GMB ahead of Thursday’s ““Fatcat Day”.
That is when t the average boss in the Stock Exchange’s FTSE 100 firms will have already earned what the average UK worker gets in a year.
Bosses’ pay has What the hourly minimum wage would be if it had kept pace with FTSE 100 chief executives’ pay, instead of £7.50 nearly quadrupled from £1.23million to £ 4.35million since the national minimum wage was introduced 20 years ago.
But the minimum has barely doubled – rising from £3.60 an hour to just £7.50.
GMB general secretary Tim Roache said: “The minimum wage was a hugely important step for working people and its anniversary should be a celebration.
Sickening
“But this 20th birthday risks being marred by the growing pay gap between workers and comp pany y bosses. As our investigation shows, the rich h have pulled right ahead from the rest, to an extent that is sickening. “GMB supports supp a national minimu minimum wage of at least £10 an a hour. It would bring sig significant returns as money circulates through the ec economy.”