Assuming you know what data to include and what not. For instance, it is not obvious to me whether the "company" means a company in one country only, or all the legal entities of a multinational. Should you include part-time workers, and if you should how should you do it (the actual pay or the FTE equivalent pay, and what are the FTE hours for different jobs?)
If that's too much for someone to deal with they're probably not going to last long as a CEO. This is the kind of thing people have HR departments for, and you're telling me they can't crunch a few numbers? Come off it.
It's obviously possible to generate a figure; less obvious that the figure is actually meaningful, once people understand that subtle accounting differences like whether to include the salaries of the staff of the Manila office and whether to include total comp for the sales team with very aggressive bonus structures actually has more effect on the headline ratio than an above-market increase in CEO pay.
And perversely, laying off workers to outsource their jobs to an offshore BPO firm almost certainly gives the appearance the company is improving the staff pay...
It will definitely be meaningful specially for those huge multinational with CEO's earning extreme amount. Given that the article said something like 300:1 ratio of salaries in some companies even if your median wage salary is off by 2 i will still give you an idea that the CEO gets over 100 times the pay of a median worker. It might need some work to process and I am fairly certain the protest didn't start for that reason. Companies decided that they don't want to expose to massive gulp in payscale and then found the reason to protest.
Certainly. Just to illustrate this, assume a small and simple multinational company that has headquarters and marketing (100 staff) in the US and manufacturing workforce (150 staff) in Vietnam. That's all the workforce.
The median salary in the company will be about $200 per month (because a majority of workforce is in a low-pay country). If the CEO makes $250,000 per year (which is not particularly much for a company of this size), she'll earn an outrageous 100 times as much as the median in the company.
Now let's assume that activists are unhappy with this 100 times difference and there's a boycott in order to reduce the CEO pay in proportion to workers. Guess what will happen?
Half of the workforce in Vietnam is kicked out and the gap in production is bought from a manufacturing partner in Pakistan (where the workers will earn $150 per month).
CEO pay is unchanged, but the median pay is now $2500 (pay of a not-high-status sales assistant in US). The CEO now earns only 10 times as much as the median worker!
Did things improve for the poor workers? Well, you could say so, because some people in Pakistan got a job, but the actual outcome still is that the people who work on the product now get less than before.
Road to hell is paved with good intentions, and naive activists are hit by the law of unintended consequences. Yes, the CEO-to-median figures are not very meaningful for a multinational company.
Let's be honest, and not pretend that this has absolutely anything to do with the difficulty of acquiring this information and providing it, and so much more to do with the "the less done to publicize how much I made, either by itself or in comparison to my employees, the better".
It's a quagmire.