1 The Northern Pacific Railway (NP) completed the third independent transcontinental railroad on August 22, 1883, linking Chicago with Seattle. 2  The Completion Ceremony was held on September 8, 1883, with former U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant contributing to driving the Final Spike.
The average pay package last year was $22.6 million, up from $20.7 million in 2013, according to an analysis of companies' proxy disclosures by executive-compensation data firm Equilar. The average gain in total compensation for the 200 highest-paid U.S. CEOs worked out to 9.1 percent last year.
What the Reports Say About CEO Compensation: As reported in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, the average CEO of a major corporation made 42 times the average hourly worker's pay in 1980. By 1990 that had almost doubled to 85 times. In 2000, the average CEO salary reached an unbelievable 531 times that of the average hourly worker.