Salaries Synthesized

With monotonous regularity the Securities & Exchange Commission continues to impress upon news readers the fact that corporation executives make a lot of money. Little has been done to give SEC's flow of fat figures any real business meaning. Most scholarly salary study to date was made by Economist John C. Baker in the Harvard Business Review last winter. Sampling 100 corporations great & small, Economist Baker discovered, among other things, that in 1929 U. S. management salaries averaged 6.6% of earnings, that in the five years through 1932 they averaged 10.8%. Last week, two more salary compilations were published, one calculated to make plain citizens whistle, the other to ease their minds.

Without comment the thoughtful New Republic published a list of 158 companies with the names and salaries of their highest-paid officers, paralleled this list with another showing the average weekly wage in their industry. Payment ranged downward from $304,398 for American Tobacco's George Washington Hill to a low of $40,000, found in four instances, while average weekly wages ran from $38.45 (fire insurance) to $12.53 (textile). Outstanding disparity: Mr. Hill's compensation contrasted with the average $13.76 a week earned by workers in the tobacco industry.

Somewhat more elaborately, the National Association of Manufacturers gave out the first figures gleaned from a general salary survey among its 6.000 members. On the theory that "a wholly false and misleading impression of the portion of the payroll received by top executives has been created in the minds of many Americans by the publication of the salaries of executives of certain large corporations," NAM offered the following data:

In 694 reporting companies executive salaries and bonuses in 1935 averaged six-tenths of 1% of sales, 3% of total payroll, 10% of dividends. In concerns employing more than 5,000 workers, salaries averaged only 1% of payroll. On the other hand, taxes paid by the reporting companies averaged 8% of sales, 34% of total payroll, 142% of dividends.

NAM statisticians had not got around to a breakdown of salaries by industries, had made only a partial one in the matter of taxation. Oil companies' taxes amounted to 120% of payrolls, 25% of sales, 676% of dividends. Next came public utilities with taxes equal to 59% of payrolls, 16% of sales, 90% of dividends. Urged NAM: "Let the American people turn the same spotlight of public attention on taxes that has been turned on executive salaries."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.