Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian, 23/11/2011
Here's a game you can play at home. Ask your friends how much they reckon the head of human resources at Cadbury, the chocolate company, pocketed for the last year for which we have figures. In my experience, the guessing will open at around the £100,000 or £150,000 mark. Then, realising that the answer must be stunning or else you wouldn't be asking the question, people go higher, suggesting £300,000 or even £500,000.
Those who place their bet at that very top end tend to smile at the absurdity of it, acknowledging in advance the madness of such a high salary. So far, in two years of playing this game, I have never seen anyone get the right answer. Which is that in 2008 Bob Stack, then head of HR for Cadbury, was rewarded with a package totalling £3.8m, including £2m in exercised share options. The aptly named Stack retired with all that and an £8m pension pot, paying him £700,000 this year and every year.
It's a choice example, even if Cadbury, gobbled up by Kraft, is, like Stack, no longer part of the British corporate scene. No matter how inured you think you are to runaway executive salaries, laid bare by this week's report of the High Pay Commission, that one makes the jaw drop. For Stack was not some master of the universe CEO, heading up a global financial behemoth. He ran the personnel department at a chocolate company. That's not a trivial job. But a basic package of nearly £2m a year? It makes no sense.
Ask people to pinpoint the problem and they might struggle to be specific. They just find it appalling that, as the commission found, today's CEO is often paid 70, 80 or over 100 times the salary of their average worker, when three decades ago the ratio usually stood at 13 to 1. A gap has turned into a vast, ever widening chasm.
Why does this matter exactly? You can't simply whine that it's unfair, insisted the executive recruiter Heather McGregor on the Today programme. "Anyone over the age of seven who complains that things are not fair needs a reality check," she said.
Deborah Hargreaves, the High Pay Commission chair, is ready with grown-up, hard-headed arguments for why runaway pay is bad for business. When those at the top are getting so much more than their subordinates, workers get demoralised, Hargreaves told me; absenteeism increases, and staff refuse to engage with management or support the corporate mission. When the average salary has increased just threefold over the last 30 years, it makes workers sullen and resentful to note that, say, the head of Barclays has seen his pay rise by nearly 5,000% over the same period.
Free-wheeling capitalists should be particularly alarmed, says the commission. Gargantuan executive pay is sapping enterprise: people who might have been risk-taking entrepreneurs have no reason to start their own businesses when they are so comfortably looked after at corporate HQ. And of course such winner-takes-all rewards warp the wider economy. Housing in London is just one example. The bonus boys have driven up prices at the top end, pulling the whole housing market out of reach of would-be first-time buyers at the other end. It's trickle-down economics at its worst: the wealth of the rich doesn't cascade downwards, but its corrosive consequences do.
Defenders of the wealthy brush aside such talk, certain their critics' real beef resides elsewhere, in envy or a retro-communist desire for uniformity. "Move to Cuba" was McGregor's most succinct soundbite.
In one way she's right: concerns over worker demoralisation and reduced entrepreneurial spirit do not lie at the heart of the matter. Our objection to telephone-number salaries goes deeper. What it comes down to is desert – a notion so deeply ingrained that, yes, even a seven-year-old can grasp it: the belief that people should deserve the rewards they get.
That's why the "move to Cuba" remark was so off beam. Most people have long accepted that there will be a differential in pay that, in the hoary example, the brain surgeon will earn more than the dustman. People understand that some skills are rare and therefore command a greater premium. They even accept that this can result in extreme outcomes, with the likes of Wayne Rooney trousering £250,000 a week. But none of that logic applies to the current state of corporate pay.
Rooney is truly a one in a hundred million talent; there might be just two dozen people in the world who could match his skills. But with all due respect to Bob Stack, that is not true of him. Nor can it possibly be true of the 2,800 staff in 27 UK-based banks who, according to the Financial Services Authority, received more than £1m each in 2009. Whatever these people are able to do, it's clearly not rare.
Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian 23/11/2011
Ah, comes the reply, but these are the cream of the international crop, among the very best bankers in the world. The commission report blows a hole in that tired argument, revealing there's hardly any cross-border poaching of corporate talent. Not many of our monolingual high earners could work abroad and even fewer would want to. They like it here and do not have to be paid lottery jackpot money to stay.
So rarity and competition can't justify these rates, and nor can any old-fashioned notion of desert: there is no society-wide consensus that says these people do such valuable, critical work they deserve their riches. On the contrary, we lament that the City lures maths and science graduates who might otherwise have become great engineers or scientists, paying them instead to move digits on a screen producing nothing of any discernible value whatsoever.
When reward slips its moorings from merit, this surely poses a danger that goes beyond our economic prospects. What message are we sending the next generation of Britons? Why should they aspire to become a surgeon or a headteacher or a judge, when those once top-paid jobs now earn a tiny fraction of the salary attached to a relatively cushy, low-risk seat in the boardroom or on the trading floor?
Strikingly, the commission found that even the mega-earners do not kid themselves they deserve their pay. They admitted that they had got lucky, that they worked no harder and risked no more than those earning much less. But they did think they were "entitled" to what they got. Hargreaves draws no parallel with the August rioters, except that they "showed that same sense of entitlement, that they could take trainers or a TV, as those bankers who thought they could take a bonus, even if they had brought a bank to its knees".
The commission has plenty of bright ideas for change. Ignore the City bleats that meaningful action has to be international, which sadly is impossible: action has only been impossible up till now because the UK, batting for the City, has blocked any EU attempt to tackle high pay. But the larger change will be cultural. We need to revive the lost notion of merit and desert, to make those bagging huge, undeserved salaries feel a sense of shame or at least loss of reputation at such unwarranted rewards. We have the Fairtrade scheme, so why not a Fair Pay kitemark granted only to products made by companies who pay defensible rates? Such a seal of approval should be given only sparingly – only to those who have really earned it.
Here's a game you can play at home. Ask your friends how much they reckon the head of human resources at Cadbury, the chocolate company, pocketed for the last year for which we have figures. In my experience, the guessing will open at around the £100,000 or £150,000 mark. Then, realising that the answer must be stunning or else you wouldn't be asking the question, people go higher, suggesting £300,000 or even £500,000.
Those who place their bet at that very top end tend to smile at the absurdity of it, acknowledging in advance the madness of such a high salary. So far, in two years of playing this game, I have never seen anyone get the right answer. Which is that in 2008 Bob Stack, then head of HR for Cadbury, was rewarded with a package totalling £3.8m, including £2m in exercised share options. The aptly named Stack retired with all that and an £8m pension pot, paying him £700,000 this year and every year.
It's a choice example, even if Cadbury, gobbled up by Kraft, is, like Stack, no longer part of the British corporate scene. No matter how inured you think you are to runaway executive salaries, laid bare by this week's report of the High Pay Commission, that one makes the jaw drop. For Stack was not some master of the universe CEO, heading up a global financial behemoth. He ran the personnel department at a chocolate company. That's not a trivial job. But a basic package of nearly £2m a year? It makes no sense.
Ask people to pinpoint the problem and they might struggle to be specific. They just find it appalling that, as the commission found, today's CEO is often paid 70, 80 or over 100 times the salary of their average worker, when three decades ago the ratio usually stood at 13 to 1. A gap has turned into a vast, ever widening chasm.
Why does this matter exactly? You can't simply whine that it's unfair, insisted the executive recruiter Heather McGregor on the Today programme. "Anyone over the age of seven who complains that things are not fair needs a reality check," she said.
Deborah Hargreaves, the High Pay Commission chair, is ready with grown-up, hard-headed arguments for why runaway pay is bad for business. When those at the top are getting so much more than their subordinates, workers get demoralised, Hargreaves told me; absenteeism increases, and staff refuse to engage with management or support the corporate mission. When the average salary has increased just threefold over the last 30 years, it makes workers sullen and resentful to note that, say, the head of Barclays has seen his pay rise by nearly 5,000% over the same period.
Free-wheeling capitalists should be particularly alarmed, says the commission. Gargantuan executive pay is sapping enterprise: people who might have been risk-taking entrepreneurs have no reason to start their own businesses when they are so comfortably looked after at corporate HQ. And of course such winner-takes-all rewards warp the wider economy. Housing in London is just one example. The bonus boys have driven up prices at the top end, pulling the whole housing market out of reach of would-be first-time buyers at the other end. It's trickle-down economics at its worst: the wealth of the rich doesn't cascade downwards, but its corrosive consequences do.
Defenders of the wealthy brush aside such talk, certain their critics' real beef resides elsewhere, in envy or a retro-communist desire for uniformity. "Move to Cuba" was McGregor's most succinct soundbite.
In one way she's right: concerns over worker demoralisation and reduced entrepreneurial spirit do not lie at the heart of the matter. Our objection to telephone-number salaries goes deeper. What it comes down to is desert – a notion so deeply ingrained that, yes, even a seven-year-old can grasp it: the belief that people should deserve the rewards they get.
That's why the "move to Cuba" remark was so off beam. Most people have long accepted that there will be a differential in pay that, in the hoary example, the brain surgeon will earn more than the dustman. People understand that some skills are rare and therefore command a greater premium. They even accept that this can result in extreme outcomes, with the likes of Wayne Rooney trousering £250,000 a week. But none of that logic applies to the current state of corporate pay.
Rooney is truly a one in a hundred million talent; there might be just two dozen people in the world who could match his skills. But with all due respect to Bob Stack, that is not true of him. Nor can it possibly be true of the 2,800 staff in 27 UK-based banks who, according to the Financial Services Authority, received more than £1m each in 2009. Whatever these people are able to do, it's clearly not rare.
Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian 23/11/2011
Ah, comes the reply, but these are the cream of the international crop, among the very best bankers in the world. The commission report blows a hole in that tired argument, revealing there's hardly any cross-border poaching of corporate talent. Not many of our monolingual high earners could work abroad and even fewer would want to. They like it here and do not have to be paid lottery jackpot money to stay.
So rarity and competition can't justify these rates, and nor can any old-fashioned notion of desert: there is no society-wide consensus that says these people do such valuable, critical work they deserve their riches. On the contrary, we lament that the City lures maths and science graduates who might otherwise have become great engineers or scientists, paying them instead to move digits on a screen producing nothing of any discernible value whatsoever.
When reward slips its moorings from merit, this surely poses a danger that goes beyond our economic prospects. What message are we sending the next generation of Britons? Why should they aspire to become a surgeon or a headteacher or a judge, when those once top-paid jobs now earn a tiny fraction of the salary attached to a relatively cushy, low-risk seat in the boardroom or on the trading floor?
Strikingly, the commission found that even the mega-earners do not kid themselves they deserve their pay. They admitted that they had got lucky, that they worked no harder and risked no more than those earning much less. But they did think they were "entitled" to what they got. Hargreaves draws no parallel with the August rioters, except that they "showed that same sense of entitlement, that they could take trainers or a TV, as those bankers who thought they could take a bonus, even if they had brought a bank to its knees".
The commission has plenty of bright ideas for change. Ignore the City bleats that meaningful action has to be international, which sadly is impossible: action has only been impossible up till now because the UK, batting for the City, has blocked any EU attempt to tackle high pay. But the larger change will be cultural. We need to revive the lost notion of merit and desert, to make those bagging huge, undeserved salaries feel a sense of shame or at least loss of reputation at such unwarranted rewards. We have the Fairtrade scheme, so why not a Fair Pay kitemark granted only to products made by companies who pay defensible rates? Such a seal of approval should be given only sparingly – only to those who have really earned it.