I often saw payroll figures in 1973-5 at AOSHUK (I worked in Dept 8 and also as FBO) and again around 1980/1 (FBO again). The top execs generally didn't get paid significantly more than the rest of the crew. The ones who raked it in were the reges and booksales people. The Non-SO tech people, in the days when there were such, generally got more money than the SO people (duh), but since they had to pay rent and buy food etc. that was not unfair. They were rarely paid a living wage, let alone huge amounts. There could have been some ridiculous tech bonus system for NSO, but I didn't see it.
I did see ridiculous book bonuses being paid out, week after week after week, that did make me sick. Thousands of dollars being paid to reges for getting people to use money they had on account already for training and auditing for "special properties", i.e. fancy leather-bound copies of books selling for thousands of dollars. Just in case anyone doesn't understand this, here it how it works. Book income and tax setasides and so forth are subtracted from the gross income for that week, and the org gets to spend maybe 40-50% of what is left (the "Corrected Gross Income"). This is irrespective of whether the book income is fresh money, or is a debit from account of money paid in years before.
So maybe the org makes $25,000 income that week, and the CGI would have been maybe $20,000, and the org gets to live off maybe $8,000 for utilities, postage, promo, staff pay etc. If some criminal reg like Hazel Grafton or Peter Morgan then "sold" a leatherbound piece of shit to someone for $4,000, making themselves $600 commission in the process, it would make no difference to the Gross Income for the week, but the book income would jump by $4,000, and the CGI would shrink by $4,000. In this case, the org would suddenly have only $6,500 for stuff that week. It was heartbreaking. My complaints were met with "Books make booms," and the fact that one leatherbound copy of Battlefield Earth bought as an investment (hah!) didn't exactly fit into the "Books are Dissemination" theory didn't enter into their thoughts at all.
Paul