Way back in the early 1950s, before I abandoned the real world and joined the glorious fantasy world of journalism, I worked for a spell as the research officer of the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions. Among my tasks was the preparation of pay claims covering the members of our 48 affiliated unions – claims which in those days came round with clockwork regularity every 12 months.
One year the Confed, as we called ourselves, decided to throw caution to the winds (I apologise if I’ve told you this story before) and voted for an all-round, flat-rate pay increase of £1 a week – yes folks, one whole pound a week. The reaction in Fleet Street and Whitehall was instant outrage. We were universally condemned for an unparalleled example of gross irresponsibility and naked greed, which – if our weakling employers were to yield to it – would inevitably bring the engineering industry to its knees and the country to ruin.
Needless to say, this was par for the course. A familiar pattern had already established itself, whereby it was accepted that the workers needed to be treated mean in order to keep them keen, whereas the bosses had to be rewarded lavishly if they were to have an incentive even to get out of bed in the morning, let alone to do a decent day’s work.
No one except the workers seemed to see anything unfair or even unbalanced in this analysis. The employers’ argument was that (to amend Shelley’s famous words) “they are many, we are few”. In other words, a small increase for a lot of people could be damaging to the economy, while even a large increase for very few people would have virtually no impact at all.
In fact, there was a strong element of charade to this ritual Punch and Judy show over pay. Everybody knew, in industry and in Whitehall if not in Fleet Street, that after a series of abortive negotiating meetings, and perhaps after a symbolic couple of 24-hour strikes, the two sides would agree to some form of arbitration. But on this occasion, just to mark the special nature of our sensational £1 claim, the Government decided to set up a court of inquiry under a High Court judge.
So we all went to court, and argued our case before the judge, complete with bombardments of contradictory statistics. And in the end, of course, the judge did his duty and split the difference. We got 10 bob – and the nation breathed again.
All this came back to me as I read The Guardian’s admirable exposure of what is currently going on in the nation’s boardrooms. We now know that some chief executives of top FTSE companies – manufacturing and mining companies, not banks this time – have been paying themselves as much as
£30-odd million a year in pay and bonuses, while their workers are being expected to accept miniscule pay settlements, pay freezes and, ultimately, the sack.
Perhaps the most egregious example of this phenomenon is at British Airways, whose chief executive, Willie Walsh, appealed to his staff to work for nothing for a whole month in order to rescue the company from financial disaster.
As a “gesture of solidarity”, he declared his intention of going a month without pay, too – a gesture which seemed a lot less generous when you remembered the gigantic gap between his pay and the wages of his air stewardesses and check-in girls.
But now it turns out that even this pathetic offer was a swizz. The Guardian’s enquiry has revealed that Walsh’s pay last year, far from falling by one twelfth, actually rose by 7 per cent – including an “incentive” share bonus worth £35,000. One wonders what he was being incentive-ised to do. Sack more people, perhaps.
However, the most astounding case turned up by the enquiry is that of Bart Becht, who took home £36.8 million in pay and perks last year as head of Reckitt’s, the household goods manufacturer. His grotesque “incentive” package absorbs 84 per cent of the firm’s entire boardroom pay budget, and represents 5.7 per cent of the whole wage bill for Reckitt’s 24,000-strong workforce.
And then there is “Chips” Goodyear, who retired last year as head of the world’s largest mining company, BHP Billiton, clutching a going home present of £23.8 million. He regularly won pay rises of 20 per cent during his term at BHP, while offering his employees increases of 1.5 per cent. You can’t get much shabbier than that.
All of which tells us what we ought to have known already: that these people are without shame or moral principle. For some time now it has been our bandit bankers who have monopolised our anger. But now we know that boardrooms all over the land are up to the same tricks, robbing the economy of its lifeblood on a scale wildly beyond the peccadilloes of our shabbier MPs.
So what is this Labour Government doing about it? Wringing its hands and muttering that a high pay commission would be unworkable. Personally, I think a commission could have an impact. But at the very least, it would be able to expose some of these sickening facts. Instead, the Government leaves the job to the press. Thank God for the dear old Grauniad.
