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Executive Pay Up 14% in 2011

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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The data is from a major union, and, therefore, may have a bias against chief executives. Numbers can be bent.

The AFL-CIO reports that CEO pay rose 14% last year:

According to data released by the AFL-CIO today, CEOs of S&P 500 Index companies received an average of $12.9 million in pay in 2011 – a 14 percent raise. The ratio of CEO to worker pay is now 380 to 1. The newly designed Executive PayWatch, a searchable online database, provides direct comparison of top CEO pay to average wages of workers, such as a nurse, teacher, firefighter and others.

The figure cannot be complete, since not all 2011 proxies for S&P 500 firms are in yet.

The union also tried to humilate public corporations that “hoarded” cash last year and fired workers. This list includes Verizon (NYSE: VZ), Bristol-Myers Squibb (NYSE: BMY), News Corp (NYSE: NWS),  Johnson & Johnson (NYSE: JNJ) and Wellpoint (NYSE: WLP).

Douglas A. McIntyre

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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