As for the changes to retirement plans for the rank and file, he called the company’s 401(k) plan “among the best in the industry.”

The company is rated"above average" in its matching contribution but "poor" in its employee participation rate by BrightScope, a San Diego firm that evaluates 401(k)s.

McKesson’s Hammergren

The study contrasted the difference between the retirement savings of executives and the workers at various companies. At Yum, for example, employees with a 401(k) have an average balance of $70,167. Novak’s retirement savings is about 3,300 times higher than that average.

John Hammergren, the CEO of McKesson Corp., the medical products company, ranked fifth on the list, with total retirement savings of $145.5 million, according to the study. Following complaints from activist investors last year, he agreed to reduce his pension and cap its value. The company froze its pension for current employees at the end of 1996 and closed it to new employees hired in 1997.

Kristin Hunter, a spokeswoman for McKesson, declined to comment on the fairness of the company’s retirement savings plans.

For many chief executives, the bulk of their pay often used for retirement comes from deferred compensation plans that permit executives to set aside salaries and bonuses on a pretax basis, with no limits. Lower-paid employees with 401(k) accounts can only set aside $18,000 a year and an additional $5,000 if they’re 50 or older. Many companies offer different investment options to executives for their deferred compensation plans than those offered to 401(k) participants.

In addition to deferred compensation plans, about 30 percent of Fortune 1000 companies in 2013 offered supplemental executive retirement plans, usually calculated by multiplying years of service and the average pay earned during executives’ final years of service.

‘Wealth Generators’

"These benefits weren’t originally intended to be huge wealth generators but they’ve become that as CEO compensation has grown to 200 to 300 times what average workers make," said Gary Hewitt, director of governance research at Sustainalytics in Amsterdam, which provides research to investors. "They’re harder to justify as companies have abandoned worker pensions."