Executives feel pinch despite big earnings

SALARIES for the country’s chief executives range from €85,000 to €268,000 and beyond.

This compares to manual workers’ annual average wage of 17,414 and office workers’ average earnings of 19,543.

While the huge gulf between the salaries of chief executives and their workers will anger unions, the latest figures also reveal that even bosses are tightening their belts in recent times.

They have begun to feel the pinch of the economic slowdown, with the value of their salaries decreasing in real terms to below the inflation rate.

An Irish Management Institute (IMI) report published yesterday says managerial salaries increased by 3.7% between April 2001 and April 2002.

But with an inflation rate of 4.8% for the same period, salaries have decreased in real value by 1.1%.Last year managerial salaries

increased by 8% with an inflation rate of 5.6%, an increase of 2.4%, while the year before managers received a 6.8% increase with an inflation rate of 4.9%, a rise of 1.9%.

IMI chief executive Barry Kenny said the decline in managerial salaries signalled the end of the boom years. “The effect of the slowdown in economic activity is apparent in the results of this year’s survey,” he saidThe Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU) said the inherent inequalities between management and lower level staff were being maintained despite the decrease in managerial salaries.

“That increase on a manager’s salary of typically over €100,000 is a pretty nifty amount of money compared to the 4.5% on maybe 300 to 400 a week that workers got under the last phase of the PPF,” said ICTU general secretary Tom Wall.

And the IMI figures show a managerial salary increase of 6.8% when bonus payments and overtime are excluded.

Researchers took into account decreased bonus and overtime payments within the last year when calculating the lower figure of 3.7%.