Letter from Mark Langabeer, Hastings and Rye
It has been reported that bosses pay has climbed to record levels. Pay for the chief executives of companies listed on the FTSE 100, the biggest companies, are paid on average, £4.19 mn, according to the High Pay Centre. This average is more than one hundred times the average full-time worker’s pay. The top three payers were Astra Zeneca, RELX and Rolls Royce, whose CEO were paid between £16.85 mn and a mere £13.64 mn for the boss of Rolls Royce.
The rationale given by the boss of the Stock Exchange is that bosses’ pay must rise to be ‘competitive’ with US companies. They claim that it is necessary to keep ‘talent’ in the UK. The High Pay Centre noted, that this extraordinarily high comes at a time when average disposable income has largely failed to stay in line with inflation, for the past three years. Luke Hillyard, the boss of the HPC, said that this development has been good for those at the top, but questioned whether it is in the interests of the country as a whole. We think not.
When there was an industrial dispute on the railways, train drivers were described as ‘greedy’ by most national newspapers, but the press will be supporting corporate greed at the top. As the HPC noted, the gap between bosses’ pay and the average worker’s pay has grown, largely because of a decline in the power of the trade unions and reduced TU participation in the workplace. Labour should abolish all the anti-union laws so that this trend can be rapidly reversed.
[Picture top: bullion bars, from Wikimedia Commons, here.]
