No less than Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee and a wealthy businessman himself, suggested that executive pay was, in some instances, excessive. "You see these guys making these enormous amounts of money," Mr. Trump said on "Face the Nation" last year. "It's a total and complete joke."
The presidential contenders are responding to a sense of outrage among many working-class men and women.
"In the wealthiest country in the history of the world, it should be a no-brainer that someone who works full time should be able to support their family and send their children to school," Ms. Slavkin Corzo said. "This type of wealth inequality has dangerous ramifications for our economy over all. It's immoral."
That sentiment resonates beyond the picket lines. Even Mr. Johnson, who is paid to advise companies on pay, said things had gotten out of hand. "I wish all C.E.O.s were paid less money," he said. "I think they're paid too much from a moral standpoint, but it is a competitive market."
Creeping Higher
Several factors account for big paydays at the highest reaches of corporate America, among them the ease with which companies can give away stock, and chummy board members who reward their friends.
But another driver of high pay is the practice of benchmarking a chief executive's compensation against that of others in a so-called peer group.
"Companies are accustomed to benchmarking against other companies in their industries," said Andrew Goldstein, leader of the North American executive compensation practice at Willis Towers Watson, a consultancy. "You tend to get these clusters of compensation in these industry groups." And companies are prone to benchmark themselves against larger companies and set pay at the high end of any range.
At First Data, a payments processor with a market value of about $ 11 billion that went public last year, the chief executive, Frank J. Bisignano, was awarded $ 51.6 million in 2015, some of it tied to long-term performance. The board benchmarked his pay against 21 other companies it determined made up First Data's peer group.
But those companies tended to be much larger than First Data, with average market values of about $ 37 billion. The peer group included Visa ($ 188 billion market cap), MasterCard ($ 104 billion market cap) and Accenture ($ 77 billion market cap).
Yet despite First Data's relatively small size, Mr. Bisignano, who joined the company in 2013 after working at JPMorgan Chase, was awarded more than any chief of the companies in his peer group. The closest was Kenneth Chenault of American Express, who made $ 21.7 million, less than half of Mr. Bisignano's package. First Data declined to comment.
"Nobody wants to be in the bottom half," Mr. Daly said. "So over time, the average compensation in any group goes up."
First Data may be an outlier in the payments industry. In other sectors of the economy, however, specifically media and technology, enormous pay packages have become the norm.
In 2014, the four chief executives reporting to the media mogul John Malone were awarded a combined $ 358 million. Last year, those four men — David M. Zaslav, Michael T. Fries, Gregory B. Maffei and Thomas M. Rutledge — were still awarded $ 103.4 million.
Other media and technology chiefs picked up the slack. Sumner M. Redstone has routinely bestowed great riches upon his lieutenants, Mr. Dauman of Viacom, and Leslie Moonves, chief executive of CBS. Last year was no exception.
Mr. Moonves was the second-highest-paid executive on the Equilar list, with a package worth $ 56.4 million. Mr. Dauman was right behind him, with a $ 54.1 million package that included a contract extension. They received this compensation although CBS shares fell 16 percent last year, and Viacom's share performance was dismal.
It's not clear how much longer Mr. Redstone's largess will endure. He is ailing, has publicly split with Mr. Dauman, and the futures of CBS and Viacom are the subject of enormous speculation.
"Every year they get paid more than they should due to that unusual governance situation," said Steven N. Kaplan, a professor of finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, referring to Mr. Moonves and Mr. Dauman. "Those guys may be going down once Sumner is gone."
Should the pay of Mr. Dauman and Mr. Moonves fall in the coming years, plenty of other media chiefs will still reap big rewards. Robert A. Iger of Walt Disney was awarded $ 43.5 million last year, Jeffrey L. Bewkes of Time Warner received $ 31.5 million, James E. Meyer of Sirius XM made $ 29.2 million, and Brian L. Roberts of Comcast took in $ 27.5 million.
Technology company chiefs also did well. Marissa A. Mayer of Yahoo was awarded $ 36 million. Marc Benioff, founder and chief executive of Salesforce, received a $ 33.4 million package. And Mr. Khosrowshahi of Expedia, the lucky high earner of 2015 according to Equilar, had compensation of $ 94.6 million. (Mr. Khosrowshahi is a director of The New York Times Company.) His package, reflecting a new five-and-a-half-year contract, was almost exclusively stock that vests over time, so much of its value is closely linked to Expedia's share price.
Defenders of executive pay cite factors like those as evidence that seemingly astronomical rewards really don't add up to that much money. In a statement, Sarah Gavin, an Expedia spokeswoman, said Mr. Khosrowshahi "has been a transformational C.E.O. for Expedia," adding that much of his compensation was structured to give him "an additional incentive to create long-term shareholder value."
All told, tech and media C.E.O.s made up 17 of the highest-paid 30 spots on Equilar's list last year.
According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data compiled by the A.F.L.-C.I.O., the average worker in the United States who doesn't have management responsibility earns $ 36,875 a year. By that measure, the average chief executive on the Equilar list makes roughly 523 times the average worker salary.
It's not a perfect comparison. Executive pay includes stock grants, often with multiyear payouts and performance targets, while low-paid workers rarely receive stock, let alone long-term incentive packages. Nonetheless, the discrepancy is stark. A bank teller at Wells Fargo making that average wage would have to work more than half a millennium, until 2539, to earn what that company's chief executive, Mr. Stumpf, who made the average among chiefs on the Equilar list, earned last year.
Incomplete as such ratios may be, chief executives will have to get used to them. Starting in 2018, companies will be required to disclose the ratio of their C.E.O.s' pay to the median compensation of their employees. The Securities and Exchange Commission will allow companies significant leeway when interpreting their own data, which could keep ratios down.
In the interim, data from other sources offers a hint of what to expect. PayScale, a company that makes enterprise software, has surveyed more than 80,000 workers about their pay. Using that data, it is possible to roughly approximate ratios of the sort that the S.E.C. will soon require.
The biggest gap between C.E.O. and worker pay was at Expedia, where Mr. Khosrowshahi made 993 times the median pay of his employees, as reported to PayScale. That is not so surprising given Mr. Khosrowshahi's enormous multiyear contract. But it held true even with Expedia's high median salary of $ 95,300.
Perhaps more glaring was the discrepancy between the Walmart chief executive, C. Douglas McMillon, who made $ 19.4 million, nearly the average among the Equilar 200, and his workers, who reported a median salary of just $ 24,600. Mr. McMillon thus made 789 times the income of his median employee, using PayScale and Equilar data.
Walmart said it had raised wages for more than 1.2 million employees in February. Mr. McMillon himself started as an hourly worker at Walmart and the company said that most of his compensation was based on company performance.
Such huge gulfs between worker and executive pay are a recent phenomenon. According to an analysis by the Economic Policy Institute, a research organization that focuses on labor issues, C.E.O.s of the top 350 American companies by sales made just 30 times what average workers in their industries did in 1978. By 1989, chiefs were making 59 times what their average workers made; by 2000, they were making 383 times what the average workers made.
"It's an eye-popping number," said Ms. Slavkin Corzo. "That means the typical worker would have to work for hundreds of years to make what a C.E.O. makes in one year."
Eye-popping as such numbers may be, compensation specialists don't expect the S.E.C.'s ratio rule to change these disparities very much. But Mr. Johnson said it might embarrass retailers like Walmart. "It will throw another log on the fire, but I don't think it will have a huge impact," he said.
Other Ways to Get Paid
Being the chief executive of a big publicly traded company isn't the only way to get paid these days.
Masimo, a small medical device company with a market value of just $ 2.4 billion and annual sales of about $ 630 million, saw fit to award its chief executive, Joe Kiani, $ 119.2 million in cash and stock. Palo Alto Networks, an enterprise technology company with just under $ 1 billion in sales, awarded its chief executive, Mark D. McLaughlin, $ 66.6 million. And Paul J. Taubman, an investment banker who recently took his firm, PJT Partners, public, received a package composed almost entirely of stock worth $ 75.5 million. Because their companies didn't have $ 1 billion in sales, they were not included in the Equilar 200.
A business leader does not even have to be a C.E.O. to make a fortune. Lowly chief financial officers, chief operating officers and division heads are also hauling in staggering pay packages.
When Google reorganized last yearto become Alphabet, it placed Sundar Pichai in charge of its search business. For taking control of the subsidiary, called Google, he was awarded stock and cash worth $ 100.6 million.
Alphabet's chief financial officer, Ruth Porat, who was recruited from Morgan Stanley, was awarded $ 31.1 million. And Patrick Pichette, the company's departing chief financial officer, received a golden parachute worth $ 56.6 million.
Among companies that gave lavish packages to chief executives, other senior executives were also richly rewarded. At Viacom, Thomas E. Dooley, the chief operating officer, was awarded $ 29.4 million. At Comcast, Michael J. Cavanagh, the chief financial officer, received $ 40.6 million.
And at First Data, where Mr. Bisignano received the sixth-highest total compensation among chief executives last year, his deputies fared well, too.
Daniel Charron, executive vice president of global business solutions, was awarded $ 24.8 million, while the total for Guy Chiarello, the company's president, was $ 20.6 million.
"These are very high numbers. Some people think it's too much," Mr. Kaplan said. "But if you look at what people are making in the market — technology and globalization have played into this — these are market rates."
Yet the highest earners in the United States are not employees at public companies encumbered by pesky compensation committees. They are hedge fund managers like Kenneth C. Griffin, who runs Citadel and made $ 1.7 billion last year. James Simons, founder of Renaissance Technologies, also earned $ 1.7 billion in 2015.
Three other hedge fund managers — Ray Dalio of Bridgewater Associates, David Tepper of Appaloosa Management and Israel Englander of Millennium Management — each made more than $ 1 billion. Another three men made $ 500 million or more.
The figures for hedge fund managers, compiled by Institutional Investor's Alpha magazine, take into account the money they have invested in their funds as well as the fees they charge.
Together, the top 25 best-paid hedge fund managers took in a combined $ 13 billion last year.
Concentrated Wealth
On a case-by-case basis, large executive pay packages are easy to understand. Big companies employ thousands of people and generate billions in sales. Competition for top executive talent is intense, especially in today's global marketplace. From that perspective, Mr. Kaplan said: "In this day and age, I don't think they're particularly overpaid."
And chief executive pay declined in 2015, according to the Equilar 200, which included companies with $ 1 billion in revenue, not $ 1 billion in market capitalization, as was the case last year. Cash compensation fell to $ 6 million on average, compared with $ 6.9 million in 2014, while stock and option awards slumped to $ 13.3 million, down from $ 15.7 million in 2014. Some executives with large stock holdings felt a twinge when their company's share price fell.
But it is too soon to call this decline a trend. In 2012, after years of steady increases, average pay dipped 10 percent. What followed were two years of strong gains, until last year. And for all the talk about measures designed to incentivize long-term performance, many chief executives took home enormous cash bonuses, which do little to promote foresight. Mr. Moonves got $ 23.7 million in cash, while Mr. Dauman received $ 18.3 million.
What is more, when executive compensation is compared with worker salaries, today's pay packages seem gargantuan.
Seen in this light, the compensation committees that set C.E.O. pay are orchestrating a large-scale transfer of wealth to a few hundred individuals — most of them men, most of them white.
Previous efforts to rein in executive pay haven't yielded many results. So-called "say on pay measures," which let investors voice their opinions on executive pay, have had little effect. The S.E.C.'s pay ratio rule may make some companies look bad, yet many analysts predict executive pay will continue the trajectory it has followed for decades, climbing ever higher.
"The amount of power that we've allowed to be concentrated in the hands of C.E.O.s is worrisome," Ms. Slavkin Corzo said. "There is nobody out there that has the power to put their thumb on the scale on the other direction. There are lots of ways you can tweak around the edges, but at the end of the day if you want change, it's about changing the power structures in corporate America."
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