CEO Pay Rises To Sickening Levels

The CEOs of corporations are making more than they’ve ever made before, in fact CEO pay has risen 1,000% between 1978 and 2023. But the heads of Irish corporations are raking it in too.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the top 10 CEOs in the USA were getting an annual pay packet of between $60 to $164 million. But that underestimated just how much these parasites were making. For example, Elon Musk made $29 billion last year and while Jeff Bezos is on a salary of just $80,000 dollars his Amazon stock makes him $8 million an hour.

Yeah you read that right - $8 million an hour!

But we don’t have to stray far from home to find examples of capitalist parasites making a killing. Ryanair head Michael O’Leary is going to get a €100 million bonus if he stays on for 3 more years, while his stock is worth €1 billion.

Irish CEO’s pay rose 31% from 2023 to 2024 - the average salary for the top 21 was €4.36 million a year. The bosses of Irish corporations are good at hiding themselves but just look at the salaries being paid to these guys:

Peter Jackson of Flutter Entertainment, which owns Paddy Power, was paid €18.9 million in 2024. Tony Smurfit of Smurfit Westrock got €12.7 million. Albert Manifold of Cement Roadstone Holdings was paid €11.6 million while Edmond Scanlon of Kerry Group got €6 million. Steve Cutler of Icon was paid €4.8 million while Eamon Rothwell at the Irish Continental Group was paud €4.5 million.

Over 130,000 workers in Ireland are classed as being in poverty despite working. We work and suffer, the bosses take the rewards. Yet all wealth comes from labour. In fact, as Karl Marx reminded us: “every child knows that any nation that stopped working, not for a year, but let us say, just for a few weeks, would perish.”

If every worker in Ireland went on strike tomorrow there’d be no goods or services produced and no profits to be made, there’d be no pool of stolen labour from which to extract sky high CEO pay and bonus packages.

That’s why James Connolly called socialism the “great anti-theft movement” because it’s about taking back all that stolen wealth, putting in under democratic control and using it for social good.

While we fight for scraps here at the bottom, remember it’s champagne and caviar at the top. It’ll stay that way until we rise up and put the working class in the driving seat of a planned economy. We need a revolution.