• Workers ready for a raise, already

    By Eve Tahmincioglu

    Now that the economy has been adding jobs at a steady clip, more of us are ready to tell our boss to “show me the money!”

    After years of seeing tiny or non-existent pay increases, employees are more optimistic than they have been in four years that employers will hop on the raise bandwagon soon, according to a study released Wednesday by Glassdoor, a job listings site.

    Raise optimists outnumbered pessimists for the first time since 2008, when the website began its quarterly Employment Confidence Survey.

    Among the more than 2,000 adults polled last month by Glassdoor:

    • 43 percent said they expected a raise in the next 12 months.
    • 38 percent said they did not.
    • 46 percent said they expected their company outlook to improve in the next six months, up 6 points from three months earlier.

    Is this just wishful thinking on the part of recession weary workers?Maybe not.

    Raises are indeed slowly making a comeback, said Ken Abosch, group compensation leader for Aon Hewitt, a human resources consulting firm.

    But don’t expect your employer to break the bank.

    Aon Hewitt surveyed nearly 1,500 U.S. companies last year about expectations for pay increases in 2012 and found employers planned to pay an average raise of 2.9 percent, up slightly from 2.8 percent in 2011, although way up from the record low 1.4 percent for 2009.

    “Organizations are still very concerned with the health of economy, and they’re feeling pressures of global economy,” Abosch said. Many firms, he added, “fought hard in the last few years to gain control back over their fixed costs.”

    Unfortunately for you working stiffs, your base salary is a big chunk of those costs, so employers want to do everything they can to keep a lid on it.

    On the bright side, he added, more employers are paying out bonuses.

    “Our statistics show that 90 percent of U.S. companies are providing bonuses as far down as the person sweeping the floor in the factory,” he said. That is up from 78 percent in 2005 and about 50 percent just 15 years ago.

    The Aon Hewitt survey found:

    • 86 percent of employers said they would fund variable pay based on company performance this year. In some cases, however, that is being combined with reduced merit pay raises and even layoffs.
    • Nearly one in five employees (19 percent) are concerned they could be laid off in the next six months, up two points from the fourth quarter after declining the preceding two quarters.
    • One-third of employees are concerned coworkers could be laid off in the next six months.

    “Positive economic and company indicators are driving increased optimism around pay raises and company outlook, but that optimism hasn’t yet spilled over into individual job security or view of the job market,” said Rusty Rueff, career and workplace expert for Glassdoor.

    “Employers should pay attention to employee expectations around pay and be more transparent to ensure employee sentiment is aligned with reality, which will help avoid disappointment that can impact morale.”

     

     

  • Trading isn't brain surgery, but the pay is better

    Wall StreetWall Street traders may be dejected by the declining size of their bonuses this year, but they can take comfort in one fact reported by Bloomberg this week: They still earn much more than brain surgeons and top U.S. generals.

    An oil trader with 10 years in the business is likely to earn at least $1 million this year, according to the report, while a neurosurgeon with similar time on the job makes less than $600,000.

    And after a decade of deal-making, merger bankers take home about $2 million -- that's more than 10 times what a similarly seasoned cancer researcher gets, according to the Bloomberg article.

    The story cites a 2009 study by Thomas Philippon, a professor at New York University's Stern School of Business, that found the pay gap between finance and other professions widened between the 1980s and 2006, exceeding the record set before the Great Depression.

    After the 2008 financial crisis, Wall Street started paying a larger portion of bonuses in stock and restricted cash, Bloomberg said. Yet there's little sign the gap with Main Street is narrowing.

    The story notes that 2010 bonuses for fixed-income and equity traders could drop between 20 percent and 30 percent compared with the previous year, adding that compensation consultant Johnson Associates estimates that the biggest bonus increases (as much as 15 percent) will go to fund managers and people who advise wealthy clients.

    Bloomberg also points out that in the first three quarters of 2010, eight of Wall Street's largest banks set aside about $130 billion for compensation and benefits, enough to pay each worker more than $121,000 for nine months of work. Four years earlier (before the financial crisis) lenders set aside a total of $113 billion, or enough to pay an average $114,400 to each worker.

  • College presidents getting fatter paychecks

    The economic recovery may be struggling to find a foothold, but the presidents of America’s private colleges aren’t feeling the pinch.

    A record 30 private-university presidents earned more than $1 million in 2008, up from 23 in 2007, according to an analysis of federal tax forms by The Chronicle of Higher Education released Monday. None of the presidents made that much as recently as 2004, the report notes.

    Columbia University’s President Lee Bollinger was the Ivy League’s highest-paid president in 2008, earning $1.75 million, according to the report, in which the Chronicle analyzed pay for presidents of 448 private U.S. colleges and universities.

    The analysis found Touro College’s Bernard Lander was the highest-paid president in 2008, raking in $4.8 million. The amount includes $4.2 million in deferred compensation and benefits, according to the Chronicle. The Orthodox Jewish rabbi, who founded the New York school in 1971, died of congestive heart failure in February, aged 94, according to the school’s website.

    Paychecks are getting fatter in corporate America too, according to The Wall Street Journal’s latest CEO pay survey, which shows the leaders of the nation’s largest public companies saw their compensation grow in the latest fiscal year, as share prices recovered and profits jumped alongside the nation’s emergence from recession.

    In a study of the 456 biggest U.S. public companies, the Journal found the value of CEO salaries, bonuses and long-term incentives -- such as grants of stock and stock options -- grew by 3 percent to $7.23 million.

    Investors also did well, the paper notes, with total shareholder return (based on the change in stock price plus reinvested dividends), coming in at 29 percent. Total net income at the companies in the study doubled from a year earlier to $510.9 billion, the Journal said.

  • Women's pay packets linked to their waistlines

    It’s hard being a woman in a male-dominated world (just ask a woman about this). Guys are generally paid more than their female peers and they don’t even have to go through childbirth. But should women really have to pay more for being overweight?

    Researchers at George Washington University have found that a man pays $2,646 annually for being obese (on such things as medical expenses, loss of wages or diminished productivity), while a woman pays almost twice that amount ($4,879).

    The overall annual costs of being overweight are $524 and $432 for women and men, respectively. When they added the value of lost life to these costs the researchers found that obese men must pay $6,518 while the cost to women is $8,365.

    All this is disheartening enough for women, but it’s made all the more depressing when you factor in the findings of another study, this time from the University of Florida, which finds that the skinnier a woman is, the more she gets paid.

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    Separate studies of 11,253 Germans and 12,686 U.S. residents found that very thin women (who weigh 25 pounds less than the group’s norm) earned an average $15,572 a year more than women of “normal” weight, according to the study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology the findings of which are reported in The Wall Street Journal.

    For overweight men, however, the trend is reversed. Overweight guys tend to earn more than their skinnier colleagues, the study found. Thin guys earned $8,437 less than men of average weight, and they were consistently rewarded for getting heavier. The highest pay point, on average, was reached for guys who weighed a strapping 207 pounds, the Journal said.

    Maybe employers will start examining their assumptions about employees’ weight? Fat chance.