Remember those corporate executives promising to take pay cuts when the pandemic began?

When the pandemic hit, there was a lot of noise from various rich CEO and board members about how we were "all in this together", and how they were going to take a pay-cut in solidarity with all the workers they were laying off, and for the general common good.

Well, Diligent Corp, a US-based corporate governance firm, have looked at executive pay at 240 large Canadian companies over the last year, and the results are illuminating but, frankly, not surprising.

It turns out that, in spite of all the bluster, those socially responsible executives only took a 5% cut in their total pay (including stock options, etc). If you include executive pay from those companies that didn't even bother making any attempt at being "all in this together" with the rest of us, and made no pay cut announcements, that figure goes down to about 1%. That is, hardly anything at all.

So, if you thought at the time that it all sounded like content-free virtue-signalling, well, you were spot on.