Hi ,

Good news for everyone who's returned to the office this week – your entire year's wage has, by now, already been made by the UK's FTSE 100 CEOs. How quickly did they manage this? Try our calculator now to depress yourself. In fact, this year is a record high for CEO pay according to the new report from the High Pay Centre, which found the median FTSE 100 CEO is now paid £4.22 million.

Soaring CEO pay comes with severe problems for society. Research has found links between excessive CEO pay and lower trust of corporations, worse relations with employees, worse job satisfaction, worse products, and higher inflation.

Most of all, though, extreme CEO pay deepens our inequality crisis. As the High Pay Centre pointed out, the feeling that the economy is only working to enrich a very small elite while the rest of us struggle is undermining democracy across the developed world. CEOs are not working 113 times harder than the rest of us; but they are being paid 113 times more than the average UK full-time salary. Polling indicates over half of the public would cap CEO salaries at just 10 times average salaries (or less!) – a huge gap between what people want and what our system offers.

Executive pay in the UK has consistently grown much faster than average pay and, although we're a long way behind the explosive growth of CEO pay in the US, CEOs are back on this trend after the pandemic led to a temporary fall. Excessive pay for the very richest has grown alongside the decline of trade unions in the UK, so there are some reasons to be optimistic about the forthcoming Employment Rights Bill which (while watered down and being heavily lobbied on) represents the first expansion of worker or trade union rights in decades. Any positive effects from this will be slow to manifest, however, and as people who have looked outside recently will know, we need urgent action.

So begins 2025!

How should we tax global giants like Amazon? You said:

• "Large corporation tax relative to number of employees. Tax on high revenues as well as tax on profits. Excess profits tax above a determined level."
  
  
• "Possibilities: Tax on UK turnover; tax on online sales generally. We are far too keen on selling off our key enterprises to foreign investors (just because they have the money to line the pockets of current directors and shareholders) who then fleece the UK, strip assets, make UK workers redundant and make no or a minimal contribution to British life and livelihood."
  
  

• "Best to work with other countries and make an international movement. If they threaten to leave when properly taxed say good riddance, We could develop our own delivery service, pay the workers better, better working conditions with profits helping public services."
  
  

• "The environmental degradation mass corporations like Amazon create need to be taxed. There needs to be a curtailing of the ever consuming culture we seem to be in. However, if this is brought up it is framed as "being hard on business" not protecting our future."
  
  

• "I think your first question is too broad - generally small domestic companies cannot afford to pay more tax but internationals ones can. Tax arrangements that allow global companies to move their profits to the lowest tax jurisdictions should be ended. If you do business in a country, you should pay taxes on your profits in that country, and the internal transfers that companies use to inflate internal costs and shift costs to "rebalance" profits should be outlawed."