LETTER from Mark Langabeer, member of Newton Abbot Labour Party.
An article in the Guardian newspaper and circulated on social media, revealed the gap between bosses pay and their workforces as nothing short of a national scandal. The High Pay Centre thinktank says that Ocado, an online grocery delivery firm, paid its CEO 2605 times the annual pay of its staff. Bosses at JD Sports and Tesco were paid over 300 times the average wage of employees. The ‘poor’ old boss at Morrisons was paid a mere 217 times the average of their staff.
The report said that the UK’s 100 biggest stock market listed companies’ bosses’ pay was on average, 73 times the level of their average worker. The report said that there is no business or moral justification for paying an executive over 2000 times the level of its staff. It concluded that ministers, employers and shareholders must all put an end to this runaway train. Luke Hildyard, Director of the High Pay Centre, argued that low pay was commonplace for large number of workers but naively suggested that their disclosure could help investors, policymakers and companies think more deeply about how to improve fairness at work.
Asking your boss to improve wages will prove as unsuccessful as asking your pet cat to turn vegan. Only a Labour Government, committed to introducing a minimum wage of two-thirds of the average wage and sweeping away the anti-trade union laws, can change the current injustices of pay in the workplace. Even better, bring the top 100 companies, referred to in the report, into public ownership, which is the only means of ensuring fairness in the workplace.
