Top bosses' annual salaries equal average employees lifetime earnings

A CEO makes 60% more than the rest of the executives the team, three times as much as middle management staff and 30 times more than the average salary across the entire economy.
The Total Remuneration Survey, conducted by Mercer consultancy company, can reveal that one head of a multinational earned a monthly gross income worth 11,600 euros. The average gross wage across the entire economy stood at 420 euros last year, which means the ‘average employee’ earns a little more than 5,000 euros gross income a year. For over thirty years of work, such an employee would earn 150,000 euros, while a CEO earns 140,000 euros in one year.
“The chief executive officer is liable before shareholders for the entire budget of the company, for its profit, for market share and turnover, which exceeds 250 million euros (on the sample we used), whereas the number of employees stands at more than 3,500. Not every CEO makes this much money,” says Oana Botolan, country manager of Consulteam, Mercer’s representative on the domestic market, when explaining top managers’ incomes.
Salaries for top and middle management positions have increased a great deal over the last two years, by 20 to 50 percent, and even doubled at times, given that more and more investors have started operations on the market, whilst the need for top managers has also increased.
According to the estimates of the National Forecast Committee, the average net salary will reach 1,200 euros by 2010.
Investments and the fast-paced economic growth, which overlapped the “migration of brains” abroad during the nineties, are adding to the shortage of management staff.
Romania is faced with the world’s worst personnel shortage, reveals the data of a survey conducted by the leading international personnel leasing company Manpower. The most serious shortages are in engineering, management and for skilled personnel.
“The head of a company has to have an extensive knowledge of the business, and also in other related fields,” Botolan adds. Moreover, all the executives at the helm of a corporation have 8 to 12 years’ experience, most of the time in a management position.
The data analysed by Mercer refers to the net monetary earnings collected in one month (the base salary), plus bonuses and other perks that an employee receives.
The Mercer survey analysed salaries in 100 companies on the Romanian market, most of them multinationals, and took into account 250 different positions in the following fields: consumer, FMCG, retail, IT, insurance, manufacturing/engineering, pharmaceutical, transport, distribution, and services. It should be noted that only one of the companies in Mercer’s survey operates in the banking sector.