By Barrabi
Alphabet-owned Google is planning to give hefty raises and stock awards to four of its top executives – just weeks after the tech giant informed employees they should not expect to receive inflation-based pay raises.
The four executives – Google CFO Ruth Porat, senior vice president Prabhakar Raghavan, chief business officer Philipp Schindler and chief legal officer Kent Walker – will receive base salaries of $1 million in 2022, up from $650,000, according to an SEC filing dated Dec. 28.
Google said the executives are also eligible to participate in a $2 million bonus program “based on contributions to Google’s performance against social and environmental goals for 2022.” They also each received stock awards, which are composed of a mix of performance-based and restricted stock units and valued at between $23 million and $35 million.
The changes in executive compensation were announced following an all-hands meeting in December on Google’s year-ahead strategy for 2022. During the meeting, Google executives addressed a question about the impact of inflation on employee pay that generated strong interest on the company’s internal forum, CNBC reported.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai read the question, which asked if the company planned to implement “blanket salary adjustment” to address the impact of surging inflation. Frank Wagner, the company’s vice president of compensation, said employees would receive their annual compensation awards but not salary adjustments.
“As I mentioned previously in other meetings, when we see price inflation increasing, we also see increases in the cost of labor or market pay rate,” Wagner said, according to the outlet. “Those have been higher than in the recent past and our compensation budgets have reflected that.”
In a statement, a Google spokesperson said: “As we have stated, employees did receive pay increases at the end of the year to keep them at the top of their local labor market, which do reflect cost of labor and pay inflationary increases.” Employees can also receive an increase in salary, bonus and equity every year based on their performance, the spokesperson said.
Shares of Alphabet rose more than 65 percent last year. In October, Alphabet reported a company record of $65.1 billion in its third fiscal quarter of 2021, as well as record profits of $18.9 billion.
