How does your pay rise compare? The incumbent chief executives of Australia’s top 20 companies enjoyed a pay rise averaging 17.16% over the past year, more than nine times the average raise received by ordinary full-time workers, data compiled by Guardian Australia reveals. Trevor Croker, the boss of poker machine maker Aristocrat Leisure, received the second-biggest bump, with his total pay packet swelling by 69%, from $4.46m to $7.53m. The highest paid CEO at a top 20 company was Macquarie Group’s Shemara Wikramanayake, whose pay packet increased by 48.5%, from almost $16m to $23.7m. In the year to May, average earnings for full-time workers rose by just 1.9%, to $92,000 a year, meaning that unlike CEOs at the big end of town they took a pay cut in real terms because inflation over almost the same period reached 6.1%. Guardian Australia’s data also reveals the vast gap between CEO pay at top 20 companies and the amount received by ordinary workers in the same industry. Greg Goodman, CEO of real estate company Goodman Group, earned $15.8m, which is 186 times the average of $84,800 received by workers in the real estate sector, according to figures from the ABS. The difference was lowest in the mining sector, where seven CEOs were on an average of $4.9m, 34 times the $145,000 average earned by the industry’s relatively well-paid workforce. Economist Richard Denniss, the executive director of progressive thinktank the Australia Institute, said the government should introduce a 60% income tax on earnings above $1m a year to deal with “a small number of people that are receiving enormous benefits from incredibly profitable companies”. “If the companies want to hand away shareholders’ money so freely, I can’t see any economic or democratic reason why we shouldn’t collect some of that back in the form of a new income tax threshold,” he said. NAB said McEwan was only in the job for 10 months in the previous year, when he also voluntarily took a pay cut and no bonus due to the Covid-19 pandemic. #inequality #ceo #wages