How is it that against a backdrop of global recession, while ordinary mortals live in fear for their jobs, pay for top execs rises by over 3X the average in the private sector? And why, when their companies lost around a third of their value amid a monumental decline in the FTSE? It’s even more galling that the big rise in directors' basic pay – more than double the rate of inflation last year – came as many of their companies were stamping pay freezes on staff and starting huge redundancy programmes to slash costs.
The Institute of Directors has called for spending cuts that would hit pensioners, the poor and low-paid public sector staff. Yet the average chief executive of a blue-chip company now earns a basic salary of £791,000. And they get bonus payments, share awards and the value of perks ranging from cars and drivers to school fees and dental work – all on top.
Surely it begs the question – “what kind of society do we live in?”
In the words of Brendan Barber, general Secretary of the TUC: “We've already had the 1980s-style recession, it looks depressingly like we are going back to 1980s greed-is-good politics, too." And yet it was exactly this Gordon Gecko ‘greed is good’ mentality that sent Wall Street tumbling. Have we not learnt the lessons of the past? Do we want to send an inverse Robin Hood message to our children that’s it’s OK to rob the poor to line the coffers of the rich?
No comments:
Post a Comment