YOU’VE probably suspected that you’re worth 100 times more than the boss. But sadly, in the mad, mad, world of business, some bosses take home 100 times more money than their workers.

Human Resources (March) has weighed bosses’ pay packets against those of their staff and the resulting league table shows that Carnival Cruise Lines houses the fattest of the fat cats — Carnival directors are paid, on average, 100 times more than their staff, and the CEO, Robert Dickinson, nearly 500 times more. Others who have got the cream include Sir Terry Leahy, of Tesco, who earns as much as 205 of his employees put together, and Kate Swann of W H Smith, who earns 110 times more than the people on her shop floor.

And that’s not taking into account how much these crazy cats earn from share plans. About which we will learn more later this year, thanks to an international accounting standard which means that companies will be forced to disclose the value of their directors’ share holdings, according to hrlook.com (March 7).

Smug bosses in the US are also making headlines with their burgeoning bonuses. Last year bonuses for CEOs rose by more than 46 per cent and the median bonus was $1.14 million (£593,000), according to the Wall Street Journal (Feb 25). This is good news, apparently. Researchers have linked the size of bosses’ stock options with their willingness to commit fraud — the value of stock options granted to the CEOs of those firms which committed fraud was 800 per cent greater than those granted to the CEOs of firms not guilty of any wrongdoing. “Nothing correlated so strongly with corporate fraud as the value of stock options — not the standard of the firm’s governance, nor analysts’ inflated expectations about their earnings, nor ego-boosting stories about their CEOs in the press,” says The Economist (March 5).

So how do you grab your share of the cash? You could work your way up to the top, or take a short cut by reading Fast Company.com (Feb 28). The website looked at employer demand, salary potential, the likely investment in training and the opportunities for innovation and creativity and came up with the ideal career — personal finance adviser.

If you don’t have money of your own to play with, why not get your hands on someone else’s. A CEO’s perhaps?

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