Corporate Accountability CEO Makes "More" Than Mickey D CEO?

Back in January of this year, I wrote a post about the compensation differences between the CEO of Greenpeace and the CEO of Exxon Mobil. From the research which was the foundation of the article, I found that, as a percentage of revenue, the Greenpeace CEO makes far more than the Exxon Mobil CEO. You may read that post entitled, “Greenpeace CEO Makes ‘More’ Than Exxon Mobil CEO?” by clicking here. Since it was published, that post has been one of the most popularly read on this blog. And since, on this blog, I like to give readers topics in which they have an interest, today I write a similar article, but this time it’s about two different “competitors.”

In recent weeks and months, Corporate Accountability International (CAI), an irregular competitor, has been very much in the news with their dual objective campaign against Mc Donald’s. Those objective are: (1) to get the company to stop promoting its Happy Meal product through the offer of toy giveaways (this objective is in partnership with the Center for Science in the Public Interest, see here and here) and, (2) to convince Mc Donald’s to retire their corporate icon, Ronald Mc Donald. All this CAI attention toward Mc Donald’s piqued my curiosity about this irregular competitor, CAI. So, in the same vein as the Greenpeace – Exxon Mobil comparison, and in the interest of giving my readership topics in which it has interest, I decided to do some research regarding the CEO compensation of these two adversary organizations. The findings were surprising.

Findings

To fairly compare the compensations of the CEOs of CAI and Mc Donald’s, I needed to represent each amount as a percentage of the respective organization’s revenue. It would seem obvious that these two individuals would not be, in terms of absolute dollars, compensated similarly, however, based on the results of the Greenpeace – Exxon Mobil case, I thought it possible that the CAI CEO might receive as compensation a higher percentage of the organizational revenue than his/her counterpart at Mc Donald’s.

To find the revenue and executive compensation figures for CAI, I went to Guidestar.org. Guidestar is an organization which warehouses data on American non-profit organizations. Available at their site are filings of non-profits’ Form 990s. The Form 990 is an IRS filing that all non-profits are required to file yearly. Similar to a tax return, the Form 990 lists revenues, expenses, salaries, and other financial information of the filing organization. Due to a non-profit organization’s non-profit status, they are tax exempt, which means essentially that the tax payers indirectly support the operations of these organizations. Therefore, Form 990s are public documents.

Finding the revenue and executive compensation figures for Mc Donald’s involved a trip to SEC.gov, the Web site of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, the folks who oversee public companies in the U.S. There I obtained the 2009 10-K (the annual report that is a required filing for all public companies in the United States) which details the revenue and compensation figures I sought. Below are my findings.

I presented only 2007 and 2009 data because, per the Form 990 filings, in 2008 CAI changed its fiscal year from a calendar year to one beginning on July 1 and ending on June 30. The CAI data for 2008 was only partial, therefore it was not directly comparable, and so I omitted it from this analysis.

Analysis & Conclusions

From the table above it can be plainly seen that these results are consistent with those found in the above referenced Greenpeace – Exxon Mobil analysis and that the CEO of Corporate Accountability International claims a much great percentage of that organization’s revenue than does the CEO of Mc Donald’s. In fact, the proportional difference between each CEO’s compensation shows that for 2007 the CAI CEO took home 78 times more compensation as a percentage of revenue and for 2009 the CAI CEO took home 33 times more compensation as a percentage of revenue than did the Mickey D CEO.

Now, I have no illusions that these two CEOs, because of the dollar level of their compensation, travel in the same social circles or live in similar types of neighborhoods. Yet, comparative differences of this type are something that the general public needs to keep in mind when donating to various non-profit organizations, which are indirectly supported by taxpayers as noted above, and that adversarially employ tactics of abuse accusations against corporations.