Important news tidbits you may have missed. The co-operative sector in the UK, which reached £35.6 billion, outperformed the mainstream economy from 2008 to 2011 by over 20 per cent, growing 19.6% while (more…)
Tag Archives | CEO pay
Failed SOP Companies Become Targets
James McRitchie, July 16, 2012 ,
For future reference, I’m bookmarking 2012 Say-on-Pay Votes: Fulfilled Expectations, Though Not Without Surprises by Shirley Westcott of Alliance Advisors, LLC, originally published in the corporate governance newsletter VIPsight. (more…)
Google: How I Voted – Proxy Score 42
James McRitchie, June 18, 2012 ,
Google ($GOOG) is one of the stocks in my portfolio. Their annual meeting is coming up on 6/21/2012. Voting ends 6/20 on Moxy Vote’s proxy voting platform, which had 9 recommendations “from good causes,” including 3 consolidations, when I checked and voted on 6/17/2012. ProxyDemocracy.org had information on 5 funds voting. I voted with management 42% of the time. (more…)
Video Friday: Female CEOs Earn More for Shareowners but Paid Less
James McRitchie, June 8, 2012 ,
Equilar anchor Bonnie Day compares male and female compensation at the top, with key findings from the 2012 S&P 500 CEO (more…)
Biogen: How I Voted – Proxy Score 63
James McRitchie, June 6, 2012 ,
Biogen Idec (BIIB)($BIIB) is one of the stocks in my portfolio. Their annual meeting is coming up on 6/8/2012. Voting ends on 6/7 at Moxy Vote’s proxy voting platform, which had 6 recommendations “from good causes,” including 2 consolidations, when I checked and voted on 6/5. ProxyDemocracy.org had 6 funds voting. I voted (more…)
De-emphasizing Pay for Performance
James McRitchie, May 26, 2012 ,
It is common knowledge that people are not driven solely by the prospect of financial rewards. Yet, in business, motivational tools for top executives—particularly the CEO—almost singularly comprise financial incentives. In 1980, only 10 percent of the UK’s largest FTSE100 companies utilized incentive arrangements (in the form of cash and stock-based variable pay). Today, they […]
Take Action: Tell SEC to Require Disclosure of CEO-to-Worker Pay Ratios
James McRitchie, May 14, 2012 ,
Click here now to tell the SEC to require companies to disclose CEO-to-worker pay ratios. If you own stock, click here to get information on how to vote your shares on “say-on-pay” proxy proposals. (more…)
Ferro (FOE): Will Shareowners Vote for Change?
James McRitchie, April 25, 2012 ,
Ferro (FOE) is not one of the stocks in my portfolio but I did help in reviewing companies I thought were good candidates for a proxy access proposal and I did help design the proposal submitted to FOE, so I’m offering my voting advice. (more…)
Advice from AFL-CIO & CorpGov.net on Exec Pay & the 99%
James McRitchie, April 19, 2012 ,
Richard L. Trumka, President, AFL-CIO announced an update to their PayWatch website—this year’s version is called CEO Pay and the 99%. Trumka says it’s your one-stop shop for the most recent information on out-of-control CEO pay and what you can do to stop it. (more…)
British Petroleum (BP): How I Voted
James McRitchie, April 10, 2012 ,
British Petroleum (BP) is one of the stocks in my portfolio. Their annual meeting is coming up on 4/12/2012. Voting ends 4/11 on Moxy Vote’s proxy voting platform, which had no voting (more…)
Schlumberger (SLB): How I Voted
James McRitchie, April 9, 2012 ,
Schlumberger (SLB) is one of the stocks in my portfolio. Their annual meeting is coming up on 4/11/2012 in Curacao, frequently referred to as “one of the Caribbean’s best-kept secrets,” and not easy to get to from (more…)
Where's the Boss? And What Counts as "Work"?
James McRitchie, March 26, 2012 ,
Last week the Wall Street Journal printed an article describing how CEOs around the world spend their time. The article drew on data from a larger study, the Executive Time Use Project, and relied on reports of time use by CEO’s personal assistants. The article indicates that assistants only tracked activities that lasted (more…)
Parsing the Vote: CEO Pay Characteristics Relative to Shareholder Dissent
James McRitchie, March 19, 2012 ,
That’s the title of a new report from ISS on the factors that contributed to significant investor opposition during last year’s say-on-pay votes at U.S. companies. From the summary: (more…)
SVNAD – Executive Comp: Every CEO Above Average!
James McRitchie, January 24, 2012 ,
The stock market still has not recovered from the meltdown of 2008, and many companies have had severe reductions in their workforces, but CEO compensation of major U.S. companies rose 36.5% last year. Why is there this disconnect between stock market performance, mass layoffs and CEO compensation? What should boards of directors be doing to […]
CII Contract with Equilar a Positive Step But More Needed to Address Pay Issue
James McRitchie, January 11, 2012 ,
Equilar, the leading provider of executive compensation benchmarking and research solutions, announced the release of its Pay-For-Performance Analytics suite yesterday, along with the fact that the Council of Institutional Investors (CII), whose members hold $3 trillion in assets, has signed on as the first client. According to the press release: By combining an innovative market-based algorithm to identify peer […]
Walgreen: How I Voted
James McRitchie, January 9, 2012 ,
Walgreen Co. (WAG) is one of the stocks in my portfolio. Their annual meeting is coming up on January 11. Voting on MoxyVote.com‘s platform ends January 10. When I last looked, MoxyVote.com had recommendations from seven “good causes,” which included three consolidations. ProxyDemocracy.org had five (more…)
Friday Video Supplement: Every CEO Above Average
James McRitchie, January 6, 2012 ,
SVNACD Program 1/19/2012; 7:30-8:00 a.m. Continental Breakfast; 8:00-9:30 a.m. Palo Alto, CA The stock market still has not recovered from the meltdown of 2008, and many companies have had severe reductions in their workforces, but CEO (more…)
Median CEO Compensation Up 28% in 2010 Says GMI
James McRitchie, December 22, 2011 ,
GMI released their CEO Pay Survey 2011, one of the largest surveys of CEO compensation in North America, based on analysis of the Russell 3000 and S&P 500 companies. Key findings include: Total Realized Compensation in the S&P 500 rose by about 36 percent. Total Realized Compensation in the Russell 1000 rose by more (more…)
Can't We All Just Get Along?
James McRitchie, November 27, 2011 ,
The Media is No Friend of Corporate Directors, writes T.K. Kerstetter. That’s right, and it is time boards took action to avoid giving shareowners good reason to vote against directors or the pay packages they authorize. Kerstetter is upset because after talking to the press about the appointment of former Governor and one-time Nashville mayor Phil […]
Harvard Institutional Investors Roundtable
James McRitchie, November 8, 2011 ,
The Harvard Institutional Investors Roundtable will convene tomorrow, bringing prominent members of the institutional investor world together focus on lessons from the first year of say-on-pay votes. During the second (more…)
The Church and Occupy London: What Would Jesus Do?
James McRitchie, November 8, 2011 ,
PIRC Alerts November 8 issue carries an article pointing to an increasingly restive Church of England about executive pay and ethics in the City. The Church has struggled to find an appropriate way of responding to the Occupy London demonstrators (holding camp in front of St Paul’s Cathedral). However, this is clearly (more…)
Boards of the Future: A Conversation With Richard W. Leblanc
James McRitchie, November 3, 2011 ,
Professor Richard W. Leblanc recently posted an article to his blog titled The Boardroom of the Future: Changes that will reshape corporate governance that merits wide exposure. Leblanc is a tenured, award-winning teacher and researcher, consultant, lawyer and specialist on boards of directors… a recipient of Canada’s Top 40 Under 40™ award. His research expertise is […]
Video: Did it Pass?
James McRitchie, October 22, 2011 ,
Did it Pass? The Complexities of Shareholder Voting by Keith Bishop – One of many speakers on the program at this years’s NASPP Conference to be held from November 1-4 in (more…)
No Innocent Shareowners #OWS: The Duty of Care
James McRitchie, October 18, 2011 ,
John Paulson, the hedge fund titan who made billions in the financial crisis by betting against the subprime mortgage market defends the 1%: “The top 1 percent of New Yorkers pay over 40 percent of all income taxes, providing huge benefits to everyone in our city and state.” “I don’t think we see ourselves as […]
Pay Ratios and Ratcheting
James McRitchie, October 13, 2011 ,
Daniel F. Pedrotty, AFL-CIO, posted Why CEO-to-Worker Pay Ratios Matter to Investors to the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulations on Thursday August 11. I’ve been meaning to mention it since then, mostly so that I have it file on my blog for future reference. I’ve got almost 16 years of […]
Corporate Governance Matters but Not in the Way You Think
James McRitchie, October 12, 2011 ,
Corporate Governance Matters: A Closer Look at Organizational Choices and Their Consequences by David Larcker and Brian Tayan. Larcker is the James Irvin Miller Professor of Accounting, Stanford Graduate School of Business. Brian Tayan is a member of the Corporate Governance Research Program at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. The authors make a good […]
$4.5 Million in Bonuses at CalPERS
James McRitchie, October 8, 2011 ,
“Top administrators and investment managers at the California Public Employees’ Retirement System were awarded $4.5 million in bonuses, averaging 41% of their base salaries for the year that ended June 30,” according to a report in the Los Angeles Times. (CalPERS awards $4.5 million in bonuses to managers, 10/8/2011) The bonuses ranged from a high […]
PG: How I Voted
James McRitchie, October 7, 2011 ,
Proctor & Gamble (PG) is one of the stocks in my portfolio. Their annual meeting is coming up on October 11. I voted yesterday using the MoxyVote.com platform. Today is the last day to use it. Tomorrow, you’ll have to use ProxyVote.com. MoxyVote.com had recommendations from 13 “good causes,” which included several consolidations. ProxyDemocracy.org had recommendations from 5 participating funds families. When it […]
Occupy Wall Street
James McRitchie, September 30, 2011 ,
The NY Transit Workers Union (TWU) Local 100 voted to join the protestors in the financial District of New York City, and so have the Verizon union members. Other unions, including the Teamsters (yes, those Teamsters who once supported Ronald Reagan) have issued public statements of support for Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests… includes video […]
Video Friday: Exec Pay, Balancing Expectations or Class Warfare?
James McRitchie, September 30, 2011 ,
Scott Cutler, EVP, NYSE Euronext, interviewed Linda Lamel, Compensation Chair, Universal American Financial Corp. for This Week in the Boardroom (video) 9/29/2011. See also the AFL-CIO’s PayWatch and the Young Turks video. In 2010 the average worker saw a 2.6% increase in salary but a 3.6% increase in the Consumer Price Index. Meanwhile median CEO pay increased 27%. The […]