THE average boss at one of Scotland's biggest quoted companies is paid 23.4 times their typical employee's wage with Stephen Hester, chief executive of Royal Bank of Scotland, receiving almost 60 times the average salary of one of his workers.

A survey by The Herald found huge variations between sectors and individual companies in how the chief executive’s pay compares to that of their workers.

There is a particularly large pay gap at Scotland’s financial services companies.

Mr Hester received £3.3m in pay and bonuses in 2010, when the average worker at 83% state-owned RBS, which has a battalion of highly paid investment bankers as well as modestly paid cashiers, took home £54,605.

Martin Gilbert’s £3.6m remuneration package was 42.9 times what the average employee at Aberdeen Asset Management was paid in wages and bonuses.

David Nish at Standard Life received just under £2m, some 35.2 times the Edinburgh-based insurer’s average salary.

At the other end of the spectrum, Graham Stewart, chief executive of ambitious Aberdeen-based oil minnow Faroe Petroleum, took home £571,000, just 3.7 times the average of £155,870 for the company’s 31 employees.

And Roy Davis, the man tasked with turning around Fife-based retinal imaging company Optos, received 6.9 times the pay of his typical employee with his £429,000 pay deal.

Stephen Boyd, assistant secretary of the Scottish Trades Union Congress, said: “Having far too big a pay gap doesn’t build commonality of purpose. It isn’t an effective way to organise a business.”

He added: “The ever-increasing gap between wages at the top and wages at the bottom is unfair and it is very bad for economic stability.”

The Herald’s survey focused on the 26 largest public companies based in Scotland.

It did not include elements such as long-term incentive awards, which in some cases can see successful chief executives net many times their salary.

The treatment of share-based awards is also contentious. For example, the £2m bonus given to Mr Hester, who took over running RBS after its near-collapse and state bailout, was paid entirely in shares which have since halved in value.

He cannot cash them in until 2013. An RBS spokesman said: “RBS is Scotland’s largest company, with more than £1 trillion in assets and over 140,000 employees.

“Stephen’s pay is in line with that of other equivalent banks and is fully aligned with the long-term interests of RBS shareholders, including the UK Government.”

Meanwhile, Aberdeen noted that most of Mr Gilbert’s £3.3m bonus was converted into shares which will be given to him over the next three years.

On the company’s figures, Mr Gilbert’s earnings were between 25 and 30 times those of the average Aberdeen employee.

A Standard Life spokeswoman said: “We believe that remuneration should encourage behaviours and deliver results that reflect the best interests of shareholders and other stakeholders.

“At all levels it needs to be competitive and reflect an individual’s performance and their value in the market.”

There was a large pay gap at some companies outside financial services.

John Fry, who will next month step down as chief executive of Johnston Press, owner of the Scotsman newspaper, received more than £1m, some 45.8 times the average wage at the group.

Johnston emphasised that £16,000 of his remuneration was a taxable benefit for a car, and half his bonus was paid in shares.

It noted that a large proportion of its staff are part-time, thereby depressing the company’s average salary.

Ian Marchant, chief executive of SSE, owner of Scottish Hydro-Electric, received £1.2m, some 41.1 times the £30,000 average wage at the Perth-based company.

An SSE spokesman said that Mr Marchant runs one of Scotland’s largest listed companies and that his pay is in the bottom quartile when benchmarked against those companies ranked between 20th and 50th place in the FTSE-100, excluding financial services companies.

Keith Cochrane, chief executive of Glasgow-based engineer Weir Group, took home £1.3m, some 35.8 times his typical employee.

Executive pay, particularly in financial services, has been a prominent issue since the credit crunch, when some blamed attempts to net high bonuses for irresponsible decision-making.

It has remained towards the top of the political agenda, with Labour leader Ed Miliband calling for workers’ representatives to be appointed to remuneration committees and mandatory corporate pay ratio reporting.

For those companies that reported in dollars, The Herald converted the figures into sterling at the average 2010 exchange rate of $1.55 to the pound, as calculated by Capital Economics.