Radio National (probably the world’s premier radio station), “Breakfast”, 17th November 2010, “AM With Tony Eastley” reported that the ACTU (The Australian Council of Trade Unions) is saying that they’ve looked at salaries in the Australian Top (biggest, richest) 50 companies.
They found that CEO’s, top executives, typically get salaries that are 100 times greater than those of their employees.
They found that in the last year CEO’s salaries have increased by an average of $940,000 which represented about 17% of their salary.
Workers salaries increased in that period by about $3200 and this represented about 5% of their salary.
They (The ACTU) claims that the difference between the two salaries is widening as time goes by.
They (The Companies and their apologists) claim that salaries are market driven.
The Companies also claim that you need the best managers, executives, CEO’s else you lose your competitive edge, lose market share, lose share value, etc…. Lose.
The fact is that CEO’s and managers, executives everywhere have been proven in the last decades to be virtually unable to manage.
They have a poor record of management. They cannot justify their salaries even if their salaries were at the lowest cleaner rate.
It is a fact much discussed and it is mooted that the reason is the rise of the ‘Business School’ and the MBA (Master of Business Administration ) qualified Manager.
You can research and discover much discussion on this. It is thought that these ‘managers’ are trained to be ‘professional managers’ at business schools, universities and such and in fact learn nothing about any specific business.
They, in fact, know nothing.
They don’t know the telecommunications business to quote a popular business of today. Or the Steel Business. Or ship building. Or transport. Or anything else.
All they know is Business School and ‘General Theories’.
Because of this they practice ‘general theories’ when they are in management.
And their businesses, which need specific knowledge, not general theories, inevitably suffer.
We’ve already seen that the leaders of the financial world know nothing despite their lofty claims: funds typically can be shown, are shown, to have made no better gains under their leadership than they would have by either random selection of investments or no investments at all!
Now we find, unsurprisingly really, that the managers, the leaders, of the rest of the business, big money world are equally ineffectual, false, deceptive, ruinous.
This ‘market driven’ claim should have the price of managers falling as more and more executives and managers come onto the market… but it doesn’t.
And it would have the price of proven good managers increase as their track record rises… but no one’s track record rises…
None of them are any good.
So what is going on?
It is a club. That’s what’s going on. You’re either in or out. If you are IN then you’ll get offered positions. Self-serving positions where you distribute the wealth amongst cronies.
If you take a position and try not to do that you’ll soon be outed with a black mark against your name and you’ll not get another such position anywhere they’ve heard of you.
Managers are not placed by the workers. Not even by the shareholders. They are placed by other managers – board members and such. They are placed by people ‘In the Club’.
The divide widens because the Club is like a boat sailing from shore.. as it gets steam up the speed increases, they plot the course, they pull up the gangplank, they close down communications and assert their right to rule their own domain… and steam on, and away…..
What land, what country do they steam away from?
From us, the people. From our right to control our money. From our right to exert our authority over them.
Even from the government’s right to exert authority over them.
Does it sound villainous? Does it sound terrible? Does it sound like criminal banditry? Well it is. But it is natural. All bad things are natural.
Those who have will seek to keep what they have.
And the more they have then the more resources they have to put towards keeping what they have.
Or: power grows.
Power corrupts not from some vicious, machiavellian, deep, dark, cunning plotting – it corrupts simply because of a natural desire to protects one’s self and one’s own.
So if you are rich and powerful you’ll find work, jobs, positions, money, opportunity for you family, your children, your friends.. and then for those who will help you and then for those who will pay you……
And the tip over from legal helping to illegal theft and corruption is stealthy and hard to see….
And it is easy to separate yourself from humanity.
It is the nature of the human being to separate himself/herself/the family/the organisation from ‘the rest’.
Join something and the feeling of ‘belonging’ can quickly grow.
There very quickly becomes ‘Us’ and ‘Not Us’.
Policemen are, I think, well known for this. They live in their world and feel many things within their world that divides them off from the rest of us.
Soldiers feel this. Come back from Wars and can’t join again.
Nurses, social workers, firemen… on and on… the more you look at it the more you see because in fact it is true – we readily separate ourselves off.
And, of course, the rich do it, too. They feel different. They ARE different, obviously, they have the good salaries, they have the good jobs, they have the good homes, the good environments, the jealousy and envy of the world…. they are different.
So it is perhaps even easier for them to separate themselves off than for any of us.
And when separated off they then begin to refine the nature of living and working within their own sphere. They develop their own habits and customs, their own languages and modes of expression, their own postures and attitudes.
They subtly develop a whole range of things that serve at one and the same time to separate them off and to make themselves identifiable to themselves – so that they can recognise their own members.
Those who ‘belong’ know how to demonstrate that they belong.
Those who don’t ‘belong’ can, perhaps, never belong.
This was once a very popular theme and the subject of numerous books and movies – the new rich who couldn’t become accepted – the working class boy/girl who couldn’t be accepted and so on….
Times have changed a bit but the mechanism remains the same.
And thus by a perfectly normal mechanism an overclass of leeches and pretenders is born and grows and feeds on us.
And the only way to deal with it is not to wait until everything is on the brink of disaster and bring out the guillotine but to see things as they are NOW and start doing reasonable and sensible things about them, now.
So again we finish up with the same old thing: it is all, really, our own fault and the remedy in our own hands……
🙂