While it’s surely not worth dwelling over, it nonetheless merits note: The highest-paid CEOs and their top-level colleagues rake in more money in one year – typically way more – than most of us will see in a lifetime.
Across the nation, CEOs at the largest companies made a median $20 million last year, up 31 percent from 2020, according to the executive compensation data firm Equilar.
That’s 278 times the median annual pay of roughly $72,000 for average workers at those same companies, up about 4 percent from the previous year.
This year, shareholders of Cecil, Pennsylvania-based Consol Energy Inc. cried foul.
They voted 64 percent against top executives’ pay packages – which included $7.1 million awarded to CEO James Brock.
The “say on pay” vote – which public companies have been required to conduct regularly since 2011 – is non-binding. Still, it was an unusually loud signal of collective discontent among shareholders.
During this year’s spring proxy season, pay packages at just 3.4 percent of companies in the S&P 500 Index were voted down, according to executive compensation consultant Semler Brossy. Among Russell 3000 companies, just 2.7 percent failed to get the nod.
One of the most notable rejections nationwide this year was at JPMorgan Chase, where shareholders voted down longtime CEO Jamie Dimon’s eye-popping $84.4 million payout for 2021, which included a $52.6 million retention bonus aimed at keeping him at the helm of the country’s biggest bank for the next five years.
The rebuke at Consol – made at the company’s annual stockholders meeting in April – was initiated by proxy advisory firm ISS, which took Consol to task for payouts above the industry median.
Consol denied that its CEO was being unfairly advantaged.
“Our board had the foresight to retain Mr. Brock as CEO through the use of the retention bonuses,” it wrote to shareholders. “During the same time period, numerous competing coal companies filed bankruptcy, saw their market capitalization and share price decrease significantly, and did not perform nearly as well as our company did financially.”
In December, shareholders at Cecil-based Viatris (formerly Mylan) also voiced their displeasure with top executives’ multimillion pay packages awarded in 2020. A stunning 80 percent of votes were cast against them, most notably the $29.1 million paid to Executive Chairman Robert Coury, which included a lump-sum cash bonus of $10 million.
In an email earlier this year, Viatris defended the pay as an “anomaly” due to the merger of Mylan and Upjohn that formed Viatris. It also said the board had addressed shareholder concerns “by implementing a new, comprehensive performance-based shareholder-aligned compensation program for 2021.”
The 2021 pay packages were disclosed in a 10K filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in April this year. They show Mr. Coury receiving $18.6 million – essentially the same amount he received in 2020, excluding the $10 million cash bonus.
Viatris shareholders won’t have a chance to vote on the 2021 packages until the company’s annual meeting this year, a date for which hasn’t been announced.
When the company was known as Mylan, shareholders rejected the executive compensation packages two other times – in 2012 and again in 2017, when Mr. Coury was awarded a staggering $97.6 million.
Overall, the companies with the most executives on the Fortunate 50 list include U.S. Steel, Viatris, PNC, Howmet and Kraft-Heinz, each with four; Federated Hermes and American Eagle with three each; and Westinghouse Air Brake, Dick’s Sporting Goods and Krystal Biotech with two each.
Besides outsized pay, another area that remained constant on this year’s Fortunate 50 list was its lack of women.
Just three females were among the region’s highest paid executives in 2021: Lauren Hobart, CEO at Dick’s Sporting Goods; Jennifer Foyle, chief creative officer at American Eagle Outfitters; and Christine Breves, chief financial officer at U.S. Steel. Ms. Breves is leaving the company this year but will be replaced by another woman – Jessica Graziano – effective Aug. 8.
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