Executive pay is rising despite the din

You call this a revolution? Probably the most-heard complaint about big business these days, one seemingly tailored for the 99 per cent, is how much money corporate CEO’s routinely pull down. Many ordinary Americans probably cheered when stockholders — that is, the people who actually own public companies — finally began to say, “Enough.”

Yeah, well. Despite a lot of noise from shareholders and a few victories at big names like Citigroup and Hewlett-Packard, executive pay just keeps climbing. Yes, some corporate boards seem to be listening to shareholders, particularly on contentious issues like the seven-figure cash bonuses that helped define hyperwealth during the boom.

Since the bust, corporate America on the whole has moved to tie executive pay more closely to long-term performance by skewing executive paychecks more toward restricted stock, which can’t be sold for years.

But rewards at the top are still rich — and getting richer. Now that 2011 proxy statements have been filed, the extent of executive pay last year has finally become clear. Median pay of the nation’s 200 top-paid CEO’s was $14.5 million, according to a study conducted for The New York Times by Equilar, a compensation data firm based in Redwood City, California. The median pay raise among those CEO’s was five per cent.

That five per cent raise is smaller than last year’s. But it comes at a time of stubbornly high unemployment and declining wealth for many ordinary Americans. Even corporate pay experts say that this is hardly the kind of change that will quell anger over the nation’s have-a-lots by the have-lesses, particularly in an election year.

“The bigger issues are there, still to be worked on, and those are the more difficult ones,” says Eleanor Bloxham, the chief executive of the Value Alliance, a firm in Westerville, Ohio, that consults on corporate pay. Corporations are changing pay practices, Bloxham says, but not enough: “There is too much hype and too little substance.”

The latest list of the most richly rewarded executives expands on a preliminary survey Equilar put together for The Times in April, before many companies had submitted final regulatory filings for 2011. While the earlier study showed the median pay package rising two per cent from 2010 to 2011, the final figures put the increase at five per cent.

The list has many familiar names, like Lawrence J Ellison of Oracle ($77.6 million) and Leslie Moonves of CBS ($68.4 million). But a number of executives from smaller companies also landed near the top. Discovery Communications had about a tenth the revenue of Oracle last year, but gave its CEO, David M Zaslav, $52.4 million, the sixth-largest pay package in corporate America, according to Equilar.

Because the list includes only the CEO’s of public companies, it does not capture the many billions that have been earned by top hedge fund managers and private-equity dealmakers in recent years.

© 2012 The New York Times News Service