Tuesday 9 January has been dubbed CEO jackpot day by a Belgian union. The bosses of Belgium's largest companies will have already earned as much by this day as an ordinary employee in a year.
The Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) of the 20 companies with the most important shares on the Brussels stock exchange have already earned the equivalent of one year's salary of the median Belgian worker as of today, the French-speaking Christian employees' union CNE stated.
This day has therefore been declared 'CEO jackpot day'. A CEO at this company, based on these figures, earns 50 times the median salary. This figure was "only" 48 last year.
Just five days of work
According to the union's calculations, the median salary of a worker in Belgium is €3,878.70 gross per month. The median annual salary of a Belgian employee amounts to almost €54,000, an amount which the CEO of a company from the Bel20 earns in just 5.2 working days, down from 5.45 working days in 2023.
The median salary of a Bel20 CEO was €2.7 million in 2022, or almost €10,390 a day.
The gap is even more striking with the minimum wage (guaranteed average monthly minimum income) which on 1 January 2023 was €1,954.99 a month when working a 38-hour week.
The union points to the evolution of real wages since 2014. While those for the CEO of a Bel 20 company increased by 37% between 2014 and 2021, that increase for the median wage was a mere 6%.
Just like last year, it is again calling for the abolition of the 1996 wage norm law, saying it blocks possible wage increases for a large proportion of workers.
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The gap is even larger in Britain, where this milestone was reached by lunchtime on 4 January.
Just days after returning to work, the CEOs at Britain's 100 biggest companies earned more than the average worker on a full year's salary, figures from the High Pay Centre, a think tank that researches economic inequality, showed.
By Thursday last week, these people had already earned £34,963 (€40,680) – the median annual salary of a British employee. According to the High Pay Centre's figures, the median salary of CEOs of Britain's biggest companies is almost double that of CEOs in Belgium at £3.81 million (€4.43 million).
