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How's Your Pay? Probably munificent -- and nearly risk-free -- if you're a U.S. chief executive. While a few companies reward the boss sensibly, many enrich him regardless of results. For many workers, the opposite trend is taking hold: compensation tied to performance. If it makes sense for the troops -- and it often does -- then why not at the top? CEOs: No Pain, Just Gain

No wonder they say it's lonely at the top. Down here in the real world, as the country struggles to climb out of recession, profits are flat at most companies. Unemployment jumped to 6.8% last month (it was only 5.2% last June), and thousands more workers face layoffs. Most people lucky enough to get raises last year had to be content with 5% or less.

But few are pinching pennies up in the executive suite. As corporations begin to release their proxy statements and annual reports for 1990, many stockholders are getting steamed up reading about the fat raises and other payments their chief executives raked in. Already making 160 times what average blue-collar employees receive, chiefs of America's largest companies garnered pay hikes last year of 12% to 15% as the economy nose-dived. Some CEO pay packages are so large, says Stephen O'Byrne, a compensation expert at the consulting firm Towers Perrin, that they "represent investment decisions on the order of building a plant."

At a time when millions of American workers are being asked to share the risks in pay-for-performance schemes -- earning more when sales and profits rise and less when they do not -- economists and shareholders are beginning to ask why the boss should be immune to reality. Says Dale Hanson, chief executive of the California Public Employees Retirement System, one of the largest U.S. pension-fund managers: "Our CEOs are being treated like pharaohs. Shareholders are beginning to question who's minding the store."

Experts who study executive compensation say it's about time somebody asked those questions. CEO pay has been growing faster than sales and profits for years. The chiefs of the 200 largest U.S. companies received an average of $2.8 million in 1989, before those 1990 raises were handed out. Their counterparts in Canada, Europe and Japan made less than half as much, sometimes while beating the pants off them in the marketplace. Studies indicate that most American CEOs seem able to demand raises at will, regardless of how good or bad a job they do. In many cases they get raises just because a counterpart at another firm did. Says Donald Hambrick, professor of management and organization at Columbia University's Graduate School of Business: "They end up trying to outdo one another. So what you get is a circle of CEOs who propel one another's pay upward."