Most Britons back curbs on bosses’ pay, survey finds

theguardian.com:

Six in 10 people think company bosses should be prevented from earning more than 10 times the average paid to employees, according to polling shared exclusively with the Guardian.

A poll for the High Pay Centre, a thinktank that campaigns for fairer pay for workers, found that 63% of Britons said chief executives should be paid no more than 10 times the earnings of lower- or mid-ranking employees.

The survey of 1,104 UK adults found that only 3% of people thought it was appropriate for chief executives to get paid more than 50 times the company’s average pay.

In reality, bosses of the 350 biggest UK-listed companies are paid 53 times more than the median employee, according to separate High Pay Centre research published in December 2020. A total of 43 bosses of FTSE 350 companies received more than 100 times as much as the average employee.

Luke Hildyard, the director of the High Pay Centre, said the research revealed “the extent to which the lives of those at the top and those of everybody else have become so far removed from each other”.

He added: “That’s probably not a healthy development.

“Britain’s biggest employers dedicate a significant amount of their budget to the pay of a small number of top earners. Redirecting some of this money to low- and middle-income workers would be a good way to raise living standards and address the cost of living crisis but it will require policymakers and business leaders to be a bit more open-minded about whether those at the top really need to be paid so much.”

Pascal Soriot, the chief executive of AstraZeneca, the pharmaceutical company that makes the Oxford Covid-19 vaccine, was the highest paid FTSE 100 CEO in 2020, receiving £15.5m. The other top earners were Experian’s Brian Cassin,