Tackling pay gaps: what the punters say
Bosses come clean
“The man from Del Monte, he says ‘yes!’ – and little wonder,” said Patrick Jenkins in the FT. The US fruit and veg producer’s boss, Mohammad AbuGhazaleh, has been revealed to earn $8.5m, or 1,465 times the $5,833 median earnings of his 39,000 staff. Del Monte is one of “the more extreme examples” of the new pay ratio disclosures being published by the US Securities and Exchange Commission in an update of America’s Dodd-frank reforms. “The bulk of Dodd-frank legislation was aimed at Wall Street, so it is ironic that the big banks came out of the exercise looking almost modest by comparison.” Jpmorgan boss, Jamie Dimon, was paid almost $30m last year – a shocking figure. But at least it was just 364 times what the median Jpmorgan employee, on $78,000, earned.
Still minding the gap
Opponents of pay ratios “continue to argue that the measure is of little or no use to investors”, and will spark unrest and “claims for higher pay” in companies, said Jenkins. That, of course, is precisely what reformers on both sides of the Atlantic are hoping for. In Britain, firms are likely to be required to disclose their Ceo-to-average worker pay ratio this summer. But, for the moment, attention is fixed on gender pay disclosures, said Alexandra Topping in The Guardian. The 4 April deadline for any organisation with more than 250 employees to publish their figures is fast approaching. And, so far, only about 3,700 companies have filed their data. Issuing “a stark warning” to the 5,000-odd recusants, the head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Rebecca Hilsenrath, said they would be named and shamed, and, if necessary, pursued through the courts.
Reporting to date
The requirement has already revealed significant discrepancies, in industries from finance to beauty. The figures from the City look particularly bleak, said Rosamund Urwin in The Sunday Times. “Jpmorgan pays men at its investment bank in London more than twice as much as their female colleagues”, while women’s bonus cheques are 64% lower – “undermining the Wall Street giant’s recent claim that it has a minimal gender pay gap”.