confidential matter between the company and its employees,
and the shareholders perhaps
Capita's top bosses' annual compensation packages rose by a fifth last year - at the same time the UK outsourcing giant's IT Services (ITS) workers had their wages frozen and bonuses scrapped. Hard-pressed ITS staffers, who are thrashing out a pay deal for 2013, were furious when they learned of the windfall enjoyed by execs …
I don't recall this vast escalation increase in executive greed and executive salaries starting until very many years after Thatcher's reign ended.
And you know, as Thatcher herself said, there's no such thing as society, there are only men and women, and society or the government hasn't engineered this, the executives themselves, the individuals, scratching each others backs and sitting on each others boards have done each. Each individual shares responsibility...
Its no good the banks and the executives saying "the government should have stopped us being greedy irresponsible bastards": it was your own duty to be moral and responsible individuals yourselves...
As companies fall, rewards for those at the top increase in breathtaking fashion while regular employees are slapped with pay freezes/cuts or redundancy. Most of these people are core to the business with niche and crucial skills, while pointless waste like HR and their "diversity" (read: "positive discrimination") mantra trundles on untouched.
If I had £1 for every time I've seen scenarios similar to this I'd be able to buy them all out and still be able to buy my 17th house in Honolulu.
"Senior management pay was linked to the lowest paid employee "
Well, highest paid director is on around £775k according to the annual report. Assuming somebody somewhere is on minimum wage for adults, that's about £12k, so if the multiple still exists it would need to be a stonking 65x. Which sounds bad, but compare that to Tesco, where the nerk that replaced Leahy is on about £7m a year, so the Tesco multiple is 580x .
Having said that, the directors of JL don't get any special bonus scheme, just the same proportion of salary as the masses, and they don't enjoy particularly preferential contracts - no fat cat severance terms, no rolling contracts of more than a year.
You could do that, and the managers would make great speeches about it, about how "we're all part of a team" (only with more words like 'proactive' in there), and at the end of the year, everyone would get the same tiny pay rise, except those same executives would also be picking up their massive bonuses, for "performance".
The senior execs won't get a pay rise as such, they'll get differently categorised bonuses, share options, pension breaks etc that aren't part of the official package for the lower ranked staff. So there could be a 0% pay rise across the whole company, with 0% "standard" bonus awarded, and the execs get their special "exec only" bonus upped & a nice chunk of share options.
There are other ways they can improve the income without an official pay rise too e.g. rejig the company car scheme so people of grade X & above get a massive rise in car allowances, or let them have more things they can charge to expenses.
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Did the top brass resposnsible for setting the targets receive any sanction for their inaccurate forecast?
It is important to align targets with the remuneration of those who set the target, and those who are expected to meet that target. I wonder what would have happened if the targets had been exceeded?
As for greed, it was allowed to go unchecked and unregulated by messrs Blair and Brown. Brown's regulatory changes paved the way for the banking crisis. Teflon Tony certainly knew when to hand over responsibility and head for the lucrative international circuit.
Somebody pointed out that when the UK Premier league started player salaries were about 40x support salaries.
Now it's more like 150x.
The cult of the "superstar Board." Heads we win, tales we still win.
But note with so many shares held by hedge funds/pension funds too many shareholders are too f**king gutless to say "No, you don't deserve this."
No, its worse than that. It means that the people administering the funds are themselves part of the executive class and have a personal interest in escalating executive salaries as part of the great money go round escalator, and it means that the people who actually depend on the income from the pension funds have no real say in what's going on. More pigs in the trough.
"It means that the people administering the funds are themselves part of the executive class"
Some are, some aren't. Actively managed funds usually have overpaid arrogant puffballs running the show, and they will clean out their own investors. But the majority of shares will actually be owned by relatively passive investors (tracker funds, pension companies, insurers etc), and in those companies the fund managers won't be so well paid, though they may have salaries that you and I would be well pleased to receive.
In both cases there's very little crossover from fund management to corporate management, so I think that there's not the back scratching that you suggest.
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