The salaries of Ireland’s top chief executives are “absolutely obscene” and things are getting worse post-COVID, according to People Before Profit.
It comes after it emerged that the median pay earned by eight of the country’s top ten CEOs is now almost double what it was before the pandemic.
The Irish Times reports that bosses at the eight top 10 companies listed on the Iseq index that have already published annual reports for last year earn a media of €4.79m each.
The figure is almost double the median of €2.42m recorded at the same companies in 2019.
The paper notes that the highest-paid CEO was building materials giant CRH boss Albert Manifold, who received a total pay packet of €13.9m last year – up 24% on 2020.
It comes just a day after the CSO published new research which found that nearly a quarter of full-time workers in Ireland are struggling to make ends meet.
On The Pat Kenny Show this morning, People Before Profit CEO Richard Boyd Barrett said the salaries highlight the inequalities inherent in the system.
“I do think it is absolutely obscene that we are talking about an average earning for these executives of €4.7m,” he said.
“One of them, the CRH executive, is getting €13.9m annual salary while the average worker working for CRH is on €48,000
“So, the CEO is getting 289 times more than the average worker in the company. I mean nothing could possibly justify that.”
He said the salaries are totally unjustified when compared to those of nurses and other frontline workers who are saving lives for fractions of the money paid to executives.
“That level of wealth inequality simply cannot be justified,” he said. “The idea that some executive is worth hundreds of times more than the average worker – particularly after COVID.
“We learned during COVID didn’t we that it wasn’t executives that kept us going. It was the nurses. It was the low-paid retail and shop workers. It was the council workers. It was the public transport workers – all of whom are on pitifully low salaries and being hammered by the inflation crisis.
“Meanwhile, the people on the very top are just on obscene levels of salary and growing all the time.”
