Three big US consumer companies have highest CEO pay gaps

Although, just how much more they make than their average employees has always been a hot-button issue.

The ratio between CEO David M. Zaslav’s pay and the median pay of Discovery staff is 1,951 to 1, in response to the research. Earlier this month, the SEC approved a rule that will take effect in 2017 and require publicly traded companies to transparently disclose the ratio of CEO compensation to worker pay.

In other words, the average CEO earns around 204 times what their median worker earns, explains Andrew Chamberlain, Glassdoor’s chief economist, in a blog post. CEO Glenn Murphy – he left Gap at the end of January and was replaced by Arthur Peck- made 705 times the median Gap employee salary in 2014.

Although Glassdoor is not the first to publish estimated CEO pay ratios, the company said it has collected “thousands” of salary reports over the years from employees to encourage pay transparency in the workplace, giving it a “unique window into worker pay”.

The average CEO pay was $13.8 million a year, compared to median worker pay of about $77,800.

Chipotle is No. 2 with a ratio of 1,522: CEO Steve Ellis was paid $28.9 million and median worker pay is $19,000.

Recently, 20 Bay Area leaders landed on Glassdoor’s highest-rated CEOs list, including Page and Zuckerberg, along with Cook, Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff and LinkedIn Corp.’s Jeff Weiner.

None of the local businesses landed near the top of the rankings in a study by jobs and recruiting company Glassdoor.

Investors who want to keep advocating for lower executive compensation – and people who want to improve worker pay – will eventually have more ammunition.

Facebook had the fourth lowest ratio: 4.

The contrast means that the ratio of CEO pay to worker pay is 1,133-to-1.

Glassdoors’ report comes at a time when investors grumbles about executive pay are starting to reach a deafening cacophony.

However some CEO’s pay was not as high as those on the top of the list.

The salary reports also might not represent the full distribution of jobs at the company, Glassdoor said, which makes it impossible to ensure that all positions are represented when calculating median pay. Employees on Glassdoor rated their satisfaction at 3.4 out of 5, which isn’t awful or great, just middling.

“To get a sufficiently large sample size, Glassdoor also had to use reported pay numbers from employees over a six-year period, adjusting them for inflation to 2014 dollars”. “It hasn’t always been this low, which is one reason he likely is taking this incredibly low salary right now, simply because he can”, says Chamberlain.

To create the list, Glassdoor started with companies in the S&P 500, eliminating companies that didn’t have recent proxy filings or for which it did not have at least 30 salary surveys completed in its database. Companies like Fossil, Google and Kinder Morgan, all of which have founder-CEOs who had basically no new compensation in 2015, had ratios of zero. Only time will tell, says Chamberlain.