Tag Archives: remuneration

Bosses have already made more money this year than you will by the end of December

A protester in a fat cat suit stands outside RBS in London in 2012 [Image: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP].

This is another perennial story, like the annual protest against rail fare increases.

As far as This Writer can tell, it is taking company executives less time to reach the national average every year – and let’s not forget that, if you take the top 10 per cent of salaries out of that average, you get an average of round £12-13,000, which is much closer to what most people are likely to get.

So company executives probably made (we can’t say “earned”) more than you and me by lunchtime on January 3, bearing in mind that January 1 was a bank holiday (and a Sunday).

We know that executive pay is not linked to company performance – bosses have awarded themselves 30 per cent rises while at firms whose profits have increased by only one per cent or thereabouts.

One argument is that they reward themselves according to their company’s share price on the stock market – but of course they never take an equivalent pay cut when those prices fall.

And employees never see such extravagant increases – they only do the work.

Theresa May promised to “reform capitalism” with an idea to bring employees onto the remuneration committees of these big firms – but backed down after she became prime minister; she didn’t need to keep her promises now that she had what she wanted.

So the outlook for the rest of us is bleak while the so-called “fat cats” have all the fun.

That’s our medicine for the sickness a quarter of us suffered at the ballot box in May 2015: You vote Conservative, you get shafted.

The UK’s top bosses will have made more money by lunchtime on Wednesday than the typical UK worker will earn all year, according to an analysis that exposes the gulf between executives and the rest of the workforce.

On “Fat Cat Wednesday” campaigners say that public anger with elites will intensify unless action is taken to tackle excess among executives at a time when pressures on household budgets are rising.

The High Pay Centre calculated that the average FTSE 100 boss now earns more than £1,000 an hour, meaning they will pass the UK average salary of £28,200 by around midday on Wednesday. The thinktank said that after enjoying rapid earnings growth in recent years, leading bosses now typically earn 129 times more than their employees.

Source: UK bosses make more in two and a half days than workers earn all year | Money | The Guardian

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Would MPs defend their pay rise if we all demanded the same working rights?

Median average earnings for the bottom 90 per cent of people in the UK amount to around 12,000 or £13,000, so the pay rise over the last six years – for the lowest-earning MPs – is around three-quarters of that.

This year’s rise is equivalent to one-third of my Carer’s Allowance. I know I’m allowed to earn money on top of that – but then, so are they.

And this is just the base rate for MPs. Those with special responsibilities – the Speaker and his assistants, committee chairs, cabinet and shadow cabinet members – all earn more. Some of them earn much, much more.

We can only come to one conclusion:

These people are ripping us off. And IPSA has to go.

But, you know what? Perhaps we should play them at their own game.

Clearly, they would like us to believe that they are held to very high standards.

So let us demand equality – that those standards are applied equally to everybody. The same rules on working hours. The same workers’ rights. The same rules on expenses claims…

Would that work?

MPs are expected to receive a 1.4% pay rise worth more than £1,000 in April next year, taking their salaries to £76,011.

Increases are based on the annual change in average weekly earnings across the public sector, which the Office for National Statistics calculated on Thursday at 1.4%.

The increase amount will be confirmed in February but is unlikely to change much by then, sources said. It follows a 1.3% rise this year, which followed a big increase from £67,000 to £74,000.

The rise is much greater than that received by most public sector workers, who have been subject to austerity restrictions since 2010.

Responsibility for setting MPs’ pay was handed to the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (Ipsa) in an effort to defuse controversy. The watchdog recommended a significant increase despite the coalition government cutting spending and imposing austerity on the public sector.

Source: MPs expected to receive pay rise of more than £1,000 | Money | The Guardian

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Britain’s worst idlers – the MPs who wrote Britannia Unchained

I have been saddened to learn of two events that will take place in the near future: The death of The Dandy, and the publication of Britannia Unchained.

The first needs little introduction to British readers; it’s the UK’s longest-running children’s humour comic, which will cease publication (in print form) towards the end of this year, on its 75th anniversary. The second appears to be an odious political tract scribbled by a cabal of ambitious right-wing Tory MPs, desperate to make a name for themselves by tarring British workers as “among the worst idlers in the world”.

The connection? Even at the end of its life, there is better and more useful information in The Dandy than there will be in Britannia Unchained.

The book’s authors, Priti Patel, Elizabeth Truss, Dominic Raab, Chris Skidmore, and Kwasi Kwarteng, all members of the Free Enterprise Group of Tory MPs, argue that British workers are “among the worst idlers in the world”, that the UK “rewards laziness” and “too many people in Britain prefer a lie-in to hard work”.

They say the UK needs to reward a culture of “graft, risk and effort” and “stop bailing out the reckless, avoiding all risk and rewarding laziness”.

Strong words – undermined completely by the authors’ own record of attendance at their place of work.

Chris Skidmore’s Parliamentary attendance record is just 88.1 per cent – and he’s the most diligent of the five. Kwasi Kwarteng weighs in at 87.6 per cent; Elizabeth Truss at 85.3 per cent; and Priti Patel at 81.8 per cent. Dominic Raab is the laziest of the lot, with Parliamentary attendance of just 79.1 per cent.

To put that in perspective, if I took more than a week’s sick leave per year from my last workplace, I would have been hauled up before the boss and serious questions asked about my future at the company. That’s a 97.9 per cent minimum requirement. Who are these slackers to tell me, or anyone else who does real work, that we are lazy?

Some have already suggested that these evil-minded hypocrites are just taking cheap shots at others, to make themselves look good for promotion in an autumn reshuffle. Maybe this is true, although David Cameron would be very unwise to do anything but distance himself from them and their dangerous ideas.

I think this is an attempt to deflect attention away from the way the Tory-led government has mismanaged the economy, and from its murderous treatment of the sick and disabled. As one commentator put it: “They get a token Asian, a token African, a token Jew, mix in the middle class/grammar school rubbish propaganda, and suddenly they are just ordinary people? No they are not; they are stooges for the ruling elite.”

Britain doesn’t reward laziness among its working class. What it rewards is failure by managers, directors of industry, financiers. These people continually increase their salaries and other remuneration while their share prices fall, their dividend payments are lacklustre and shareholder value is destroyed. What have they given shareholders over the past 10 years? How many industrial or commercial leaders have walked off with millions, leaving behind companies that were struggling, if not collapsing? Does the criticism in Britannia Unchained apply to senior executives and bankers?

Our MPs are as much to blame as big business. They vote themselves generous pay, pensions and extended vacations (five months per year). They never start work before 11am, never work weekends (or most Fridays, when they are supposed to be in their constituencies, if I recall correctly). They enjoy fringe benefits including subsidised bars, restaurants and gyms. They take part-time directorships in large companies which take up time they should be using to serve the public. Only a few years ago we discovered that large numbers of them were cheating on their expense claims. They take more than £32,000 in “Resettlement Grant” if we kick them out after one term – which, in my opinion, means all five authors of Britannia Unchained should be applying for it in 2015.

These are the people who most strongly represent the ‘something-for-nothing’ sense of entitlement the book decries.

Have any of them ever worked in a factory or carried out manual labour? I’ll answer that for you: With the exception of Elizabeth Truss, who did a few years as a management accountant at Shell/Cable and Wireless, none of them have ever done anything that could be called real work.

In fact, the people they accuse work very long hours – especially the self-employed. When I ran my own news website, I was busy for 12-14 hours a day (much to the distress of my girlfriend). Employees also work long hours, get less annual leave, earn less and pay more – in prices for consumer goods, taxes and hidden taxes – than most of Europe. Average monthly pay rates have now dropped so low that they are failing to cover workers’ costs, leading to borrowing and debt.

Are British workers really among the laziest in the world? Accurate information is hard to find but it seems likely we’re around 24th on the world league table. On a planet with more than 200 sovereign nations (204 attended the London Olympics), that’s not too shabby at all.

Interestingly, the European workers clocking on for the fewest hours are German. Those lazy Teutons! How dare they work so little and still have the powerhouse economy of the continent?

If so many are reluctant to get up in the morning, why are the morning commuter trains standing room only? Or have the Britannia Unchained crowd never used this form of travel?

It seems to me that Britannia Unchained is just another attempt by the Tory right to make us work harder for less pay. The Coalition is currently cutting the public sector and benefits to the bone, while failing to introduce policies that create useful employment, and trying to boost private sector jobs. The private sector has cut wages and pensions. The result is higher unemployment and benefits that cannot sustain living costs, creating a working-age population desperate for any kind of employment at all (even at the too-low wages already discussed).

And let’s remember that Conservatives want to remove employment laws to make it easier to dismiss employees. In other words, they want a workforce that will toil for a pittance, under threat of swift dismissal and the loss of what little they have.

Why do they think this will improve the UK’s performance?

We already work longer hours and have less protective legislation than in Europe (such as the European Time Directive). But we are less productive in terms of GDP than their French and German counterparts, who work fewer hours and are protected by the likes of the ETD.

France is more unionised than we are, yet its production per employee is higher.

The problem is poor management and bad leadership. Poor productivity is almost always due to poor investment and poor training. Workers are abused when they should be treated as an investment. They lose motivation and when managers get their decisions wrong, they blame the workers.

Working class people are sick of grafting for low pay and in poor working conditions, to be exploited by the types of people represented by the authors of Britannia Unchained.

Is it any wonder we feel de-motivated?

I started this article by linking The Dandy to Britannia Unchained, noting that one was coming to the end of its life in print while the other was about to be published for the first time. I’ll end by pointing out a quality they have in common.

The Dandy is closing because it represents ideas that are now tired and out-of-date. Britannia Unchained should never see publication – for the same reason.