# 31
No, bigger than that. Bigger still. Think money. Then double it. Well done, and there you have it: £2,700,000 (£2.7 million) the average annual “earnings” of a senior executive in a FTSE 100 Company. That didn’t hurt (much) did it? Now divide this figure by 219 and you get £12,328 (keep up at the back!). That’s what you’d earn in a year working 40 hours per week for 52 weeks at the minimum wage.
219? Well 219:1, actually – now there’s a ratio that might tell you something about the causes of social unrest. Of course, not everyone’s on the minimum wage. Currently, 8.1% of the working population are unemployed. In reality that means 2.57 million people. And what’s their income likely to be? Let’s see, the maxima for weekly, contribution-based, payments of Job-Seeker’s Allowance are £67.50 if you are over 25, £53.45 if you are aged 16-24 years. In other words, a FTSE 100 boss takes out an annual income that is greater by a multiple of 971 than that of any one of our younger, jobless, hooded-folk. For grotesque inequality on a comparable scale I can’t think of any more recent parallel than the Ancien Regime in France
Here in the Bus Lane we’re beginning to wonder if these inequalities aren’t wrong by a factor of about 10. Perhaps the annual earnings of the people at the top of the company shouldn’t be much more than twenty (not 200) times greater than the earnings of those at the bottom of the heap. This is not to say that no one can earn £2.7 million in a single year – but if they do, then the lowest paid employee in their organisation needs to be on a salary of £135,000. Fair do’s?
People talk of the “million pound bonus culture” in the City of London
Most of the people we encounter in the Bus Lane buy lottery tickets in pursuit of that elusive first £1 million. Yet most of the FTSE 100 top execs will tell you that they need to be paid “competitive” salaries + bonuses to prevent them going abroad… It would surely have benefited our economy greatly if some of our ‘top’ bankers and speculators had pissed-off abroad rather sooner.
Somewhere in our society there is a strange divide between the habitually lowly paid and the imperatively highly paid. Counter-intuitively, the line seems correlated with the degree to which a person enjoys their job. Perversely, it seems that the people with the best, most interesting jobs get paid most, while the people with the most tedious jobs get paid least.
The explanation is simple. If people doing boring, repetitive or physically strenuous jobs find they can make enough to live on by working four days a week then they’ll throw a sickie for the fifth day. Wouldn’t you? By contrast, people who enjoy their jobs and derive great satisfaction from their work, will probably work many hours of overtime for little or no extra pay.
In truth, the working population divides into those who enjoy their work and those who don’t. Those who enjoy it would probably still turn up every day if you halved their salaries. Those who resent their every working hour will only keep clocking-on until they’ve made enough to see them through to next week. For this reason alone, there’s something wrong if the people with the best jobs (the most interesting, varied, exciting, satisfying etc) get paid 200 times more than the people with the dullest jobs. Shouldn’t it be the other way around?
And then there’s one more divide. It’s similar but not identical. That’s the divide between the people (aka “the super-rich”) who claim they need to be paid at least £1 million p.a. to get them out of bed and the rest who would never get out of bed if they had their £1 million. And which am I? Give me my million pounds and you’ll find out soon enough.
