Tony Lewars, partner of PricewaterhouseCoopers Jamaica. - File
Despite a vast disparity in individual pay packets, Jamaica's finance and operations managers are among the best paid company executives, according to the most recent PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) salary survey which estimates that compensation among that group ranges from a low of $2.9 million to more than $19 million.
Salaries featured a basic package and incentive pay based on performance.
Among large publicly listed companies, the low for finance and operations executives starts at $8 million. The peak salary of $19.29 million was commanded by a finance executive in sales and distribution, the 2008 PWC survey found.
"Typically what companies do is to establish financial and operational goals and, depending on how well these are met, the incentive amount is disbursed," said Anthony Lewars, PWC partner and survey consultant.
Incentive pay ranged from 25 per cent to 100 per cent of basic salary, the survey found.
"It is a big motivational factor," Lewars said.
Further breakout
Offering a further breakout, Maria Jones, human resource consultant responsible for coordinating the PWC survey, said the heads of finance were remunerated at approximately $3 million to $12 million in basic salary, while the heads of operations earned $7.4 million to $12 million.
The compensation packages for operations and finance executives, in some instances, compete with that for chief executive officers, whose salaries ranged from $8.058 million to $32.158 million., inclusive of incentives and allowances.
The top CEO pay was for the head of a financial services institution, but not a bank, Jones said.
The PWC survey also determined that compensation packages padded with allowances were increasingly less popular because those were being taxed more heavily.
The PWC executive survey has been conducted every year for the last two decades. The 2008 poll was among 33 companies including private and public sector organisations, with 66 of the job positions surveyed covering the manufacturing, distribution, banking and finance.
Pay increases that year averaged 13 per cent across the board but has slowed somewhat in 2009, showing "marginal" movements in the single digits.
"Workers realise that these are tough times and it is better to have a job without an increase rather than none at all," Lewars said.
Outside of the chiefs of operations and finance, the highest earning professionals were engineers and those in the actuarial sciences, with actuaries being paid more on average.
Below engineers come human resource and information technology managers.
In the government sector, the heads of statutory organisations were "reasonably well paid", the auditing firm found.
For lower level workers, the bauxite sector paid artisans best of all in 2008. In other industries, the PWC survey indicates that pay for skilled workers differed not by sector, but by company.
Yet Lewars said the widely held perception that good salaries are either personally negotiated or depended on networking, was not true.
Rather, he said, firms such as PWC are routinely paid to assess the value of positions in management relative to the benefit to be earned by the company through initiatives taken or mistakes avoided by those employed in these roles.
It was for this reason, Lewars said, that two managers with the same seniority can earn completely different incomes in basic and performance pay.
It was noted also that in all industries, only technical workers with managerial skills earned the highest salaries. "Where people with technical skills manage people as well, they tend to be better paid," Lewars said.
The ability to lead was, PWC concluded, vested more in attitudes rather than educational qualifications. "While a second degree helps," said Lewars, it was more so the "application to tasks at hand, possession of people skills, the ability to motivate staff and get them to work with you", which counted towards monetary reward and promotion.
avia.collinder@gleanerjm.com